Booksquare on Radiohead and Stephen King

Kassia Krozser writes the Booksquare blog, one of the most insightful and entertaining publishing blogs on the planet.  In a post from earlier this week she talks about the successful recent Radiohead experiment and compares it to the not so successful Stephen King experiment with The Plant several years ago.

Kassia stresses the importance of using a model like this to build a mailing list and selling other products and services.  I couldn't agree more, but, I also feel something is missing here.  All these authors out there, struggling on their own to build enough traffic, repeat visitors and visibility seems like a formula for frustration if not failure.

I'm wondering if a better model isn't one where authors work together to create a single site where all of them can reach out together.  HarperCollins is doing this with their AuthorAssistant program, but even that might be too narrowly focused; if you're not an HC author where can you turn, for example?

So here's an idea for some enterprising person: Create a site where all authors can come and create their online presence, build their mailing lists, offer their additional content, etc.  Offer useful templates and examples newbies can use to help them build their site as quickly as possible.  There's strength in numbers with this and a federation of author sites is likely to be much more successful than everyone trying to do it on their own.  Plus, if designed properly, this site could help introduce visitors to new authors/books that they otherwise might never have come across.  Think of the sizable mailing list this could generate...

Comments

[Em]

Have you visited http://classof2k7.com/ ?
This is a site for teen authors who have books coming out in 2007 - they are from all different publishers and many have websites of their own, but this is a collaborative site. They've even started a Class of 2K8 for authors whose pub dates were pushed back. The website is especially great for a teen audience since teens rely heavily on recommendations from their favorite authors. Find one new author that you like, visit this site, and immediately discover tons of other new authors.

[Joe Wikert]

Hi Em. No, I hadn't heard of classof2k7.com before you mentioned it above. I just paid the site a visit. It's a nice start and will only get better as more and more authors join the network.

[Stephen Tiano]

I understand what you're saying, Joe, but—and I haven’t even attempted to write a book in some 30 years, having written three bad, unpublishable novels by the time I was 21; rather I found my literary salvation in book design and page comp—if I had written a novel I was now hawking, I think I’d be a bit too competitive to want to take part in such a "p.r. co-op," for want of a better term. Then again, maybe I'd have enough sense to see the wisdom in the method you’re talking about.

[Alex Gorelik]

I agree that a collaborative endeavor by authors across publishing houses, and even genres and styles, would be far more successful than a single writer's site. The majority of Web sites simply disappear in the sea of options. A milieu of other issues from Search Engine Ranking to limited stickiness with a single author complicate the matter - only the most avid fan would check in with a single author every day to get the latest snippet and most authors don't want to learn the finer details of SEO - they want to write - and the fans want them to focus on that as well.

But the problem of networked promotions is a two-fold one. You need to create not only the content and the infrastructure for interacting - but also offer users the stickiness to keep them coming back. A simple multi-author marketing platform will come across as just that. It needs to be viral, social, and contagious. It needs to be hip. MySpace.com worked for Bands only when its user base had already begun using it socially. It is doable and necessary, but it needs to be about the readers.

[Robert Burton Robinson]

Joe, My site is about 1.5 years old, and gets a pretty good volume of traffic. It has a Google Page Rank of 4, and has for a long time. And it's only about me and my writing. One unknown author.

So, why do I rank well with the search engines, and why do I get a decent amount of traffic? Content. It's all about the FREE content. I offer two of my mystery novels for download or reading online - FREE. If visitors want my third novel, they will have to buy it on Amazon or some other bookstore. But the first two novels are completely FREE. (Did I say FREE enough times?)

If someone reads my first two books for free and really likes my style of writing, they just might BUY one of my books at some point. I don't intend to give any additional books away. Although, I did add a free short story to my site recently.

If an author's site is just one big advertisement, visitors won't stay long, and they probably won't ever come back. Unless the author is already famous. And even then, they might not come back if the content is basically static.