Top 5 Web Sites Promoting Nonfiction Authors and Their Books | JustWriteBooks: Nonfiction Writing & Publishing Help

Top 5 Web Sites Promoting Non-fiction Authors and Their Books

Posted on 13 July 2010 by Karen Risch

This was harder than I’d thought it would be: finding five Web sites that do an excellent job of promoting a non-fiction book and its author. Actually, I started out with the ambition of finding ten, and then changed my mind because I was, um, discouraged. That’s right: I was discouraged, not lazy.

Anyway, I did find five superior sites to share with you.

My Criteria for a Good Site to Promote Books and Authors

Appealing and easy to navigate
Offers a way to purchase the book
Builds/reinforces the brand identity with graphic continuity
Identifies the author by name
Puts the product (meaning the book) front and center
Includes a way to stay in touch: email, RSS feed for a blog, or other way for the author to contact readers who want that
Gives media folks what they need to do their jobs
Stays current: somebody’s paying attention and updating regularly

Here are the best sites, along with what you can learn and apply from them. Ta da!

Oh, but wait. Here’s a bonus. If you do a (yes, lazy) Google search on the term “best author sites,” you’ll turn this up, just like I did. But I’ll save you even that small effort and give you a link right here to the site promoting stories by Miranda July. Clever, clever! And I want to give mention to another fiction author who nails it, mystery writer Ted Dekker. Take a look: what he’s done with his online presence easily translates to non-fiction book promotion.

Top 5 Sites … Countdown

#5 Joanne Stern. All the essentials are here, and the author has effectively used video to help readers and media grasp her message quickly. Full disclosure: my husband and I worked on this one, so of course I love it, and I ranked it #5 because to put it higher would be unseemly. (Wouldn’t it?) But it’s seriously good and effectively promotes Dr. Stern and her book, Parenting Is a Contact Sport.

#4 Susan Orlean. Look, ANYONE could build a site like this. Not everyone can write as prolifically and insightfully as this New Yorker contributor and author of The Orchid Thief, but that’s another thing altogether. The organization of the site is simple, and she makes heavy use of linked text, which many online marketers believe is the best way to move your reader around your site. One criticism: her Tweets @susanorlean are pretty funny. I wonder why she doesn’t make the connection on her site?

#3 Anthony Bourdain. The celebrity chef has two sites—AnthonyBourdain.net and BourdainMediumRaw.com—one for the general hoopla and the other for the specific hoopla, namely promotion of his latest bestseller, Medium Raw. Both are good, but what keeps ’em out of the top echelon is that they don’t work together. No mention of the chef’s current bestseller on AnthonyBourdain.net, and nowhere does the book’s site point back to the main site. Weird. You’d think that the Food Network folks and his publisher would realize there was some SEO hay to be made here. (For the uninitiated, that stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process of improving your Web pages’ rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like.)

#2: Freakonomics. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s site for Freakonomics: Things You Always Thought You Knew But Didn’t and Superfreakonomics: Things You Never Knew You Wanted to Know But Do, has it all: bold graphics that reinforce the brand, heavy promotion of the current offering, navigation that makes sense, seamless links out to related sites … and a blog. Plus a way to get your book signed, study guides, and a list of upcoming appearances. The “join our email list” link is buried under the “Contact” page.

#1 Malcolm Gladwell. At first blink, Gladwell.com looks as if it might be trifling, with main navigation that points only to his book titles, a blog, and an ambiguous “Etc.” But it’s not; someone made the brilliant decision to take an array of books and credentials and arrange them so it looks simple on the home page, and then built out with secondary navigation that gives you everything you could possibly want: excerpts, bibliographies, reading guides. “Etc.” includes the author’s bio, pix for media use, a link to his speakers bureau, all that promo stuff. (Why no calendar of events, though?) And, of course, there’s a blog.

Have any favorites of your own? Please share. Want to mention your book site here? Be my guest. All comments and questions are welcome.

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