Do New York Times Bestselling Authors Have Web2 Mojo?
Author website dos and don’ts are one thing. Evaluating the success of an author website is another. If you want to be facile you could say a site with lots of traffic is successful and a site that gets no traffic is unsuccessful. Presumably, this would take into account how well it is SEO’d or otherwise how sticky it is, etc. I am more of a first principle kind of guy. If the site is reader friendly then it is successful in my mind. This is what I think “reader friendly” means in practical terms…
- Is the website up-to-date? I have taken the trouble to track you down online. Have you taken the trouble to update the site since it first went up in 2005? Is that obvious?
- Is the site in the author’s voice? I am interested in what you as an author have to say. That is why I buy your books. I am not interested in what your publicity manager has scheduled for you next Fall. give me more of what I love.
- Can I meet other readers? Can I talk back? Are you accessible? Is the communication all one way? This doesn’t mean you have an email address tucked on the bottom of the page. I want to interact with you and your ideas. If you are busy — and that is fair enough — I want to connect with others like me. Is your site letting me?
Those are three fairly simple criteria. I took an informal scan of well known author sites to see how they held up. If they are on the New York Times best seller list, then I figured they were well known. Here are the results in simple pass/fail:
- Jodi Picoult – Pass
- Phillipa Gregory — Pass
- Khaled Hosseini — Pass
- Ken Follet – Pass
- Paulo Coelho – Pass
- Alexander McCall Smith — Pass
- Sophie Kinsella — Pass
- Stephen King — Pass
- Cormac McCarthy — Fail (does he have a site of his own?)
- Jonathan Kellerman – Fail (last update March 2007?) Correction: looks updated as of April 20th.
- John Grisham - Fail (fancy brochureware)
- James Patterson — Fail (what the?)
- Anne Rice — Fail (good site for 2003)
- George Pelecanos — Fail
- Ian mcEwan — Fail (asleep at the wheel)
- Danielle Steele - On the fence
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