I know, I know, I can almost see your faces. You’re still not so sure that you need both an Author Platform and a Book Platform. Of course, if you’re not interested in making serious book sales, you don’t need to bother with both platforms and can go ahead and lump all your information together. But if you’d like really great book sales, you may want to read on.
If an Author Platform is your business office, speaking to people interested in you, the author and your authoring business then a Book Platform is your storefront, a place to show off your products. Targeting your strategies like this is not only extremely effective, it’s been perfected by some of the biggest businesses in the world. Check them out!
Author Platform versus Book Platform
Take a look at the Johnson & Johnson Health Products website:
You’ll see that this website talks about sustainability, the mission of the company, the history and the research and technology behind it. You will find pages for job opportunities and even the company management style. BUT, when you go to the page about their “Products”, note that each product you click on opens to a DIFFERENT WEBSITE just for that product. For example, if you click on “Consumer Products” then under the “Baby Products” (the genre) you can then click on one of those products and find the website showing off all the goodies (books) under that particular category. This is called “splitting your branding” so that you can make your information extremely targeted to the prospective buyer.
Let’s try another. Let’s look at DreamWorks Animation:
Here you learn all about the company (the business). Then, when you click on to “Movies” (books) you find a cool picture listing of many different films. When you click on a film, How to Train Your Dragon (my favorite), you can watch the video or click onto the website for that film! The website for that film is loaded with goodies FOCUSED ON THE MOVIE LOVER! It sells either tickets to the theater, promotional items related to the film and/or DVDs. DreamWorks Animation does everything it can to assure that their Business website tells the story of the company, AND they know it’s always best to give the film (book) an absolute creative outlet of its own.
….This is how you connect your Author Platform with your Book Platform – with a simple click that takes the interested book buyer to the book’s own, creative website.
So, now that you see the reasoning and logic behind having a separate platform for your book, let’s take this one step further.
Your Genre
What kinds of books do you write? Are they all in the same genre? Are they a continuous series? Do you write in several subgenres or several unrelated genres? Do you also write non-fiction? These are important questions, because the point of a book platform is to make sure the book seeker is treated like the special person they are. For example, if you write non-fiction about dog training and your fiction is primarily romance, there’s little connection between the two readers. The key to any book platform is to reach the perfect buyer for that book, so you would need a separate book website for your non-fiction and your fiction in this case.
Let’s say you write in one primary genre but several subgenres. For example, you write mainstream romance, but also paranormal romance, sci-fi romance, historic romance and Christian romance. In this case, there’s no reason why you can’t put all these books on one book platform website. Just be sure to categorize them for ease of navigation.
Split your Branding by Catering to the Buyer
NOW, if you also write YA romance, you may want to seriously consider keeping that book on its own book website. The last thing you want is a young adult picking up the wrong book because it looked interesting and was right there with her favorite YA series. ALWAYS CATER TO THE CORRECT BUYER when developing your book platforms! This is how you “split your branding” and get more targeted sales.
Maintaining Your Book Platform
Another big ALWAYS is to always keep those Book Platform websites active and alive.
- Add something every few weeks to keep people coming to see what’s new.
- Embed your blog so that you can talk about your next book and create some excitement in more than one place about it.
- Remember to enjoy your characters on these websites too, perhaps do interviews with them or let them interview each other. Things like this really connect readers to your books and help keep your websites alive and interesting.
Questions on Book Platforms? I’m here and I’d love to answer them!
COMING UP: Next time we’ll be talking about how an author can use publicity!
Deborah Riley-Magnus, Author Success Coach
Author Bio
Deborah Riley-Magnus is an author and an Author Success Coach. She has a twenty-seven year professional background in marketing, advertising and public relations as a writer for print, television and radio. She writes fiction in several genres as well as non-fiction. Her non-fiction, Finding Author Success: Discovering and Uncovering the Power Within Your Manuscript was published on November 5, 2011. “Finding Author Success “on Amazon – Kindle and Paper.
She’s lived on both the east and west coast of the United States and has traveled the country widely. She is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and just returned after living in Los Angeles, California for several years.