Are authors having to work overtime in making their presence known on the Internet? Do authors really need a personal website, a blog, a Facebook page, an Instagram, and a presence on every social media site imaginable? Okay, I will admit that it probably does help the search engine if an author has as many backlinks going from one site to another. But, I ask once again, is it all truly necessary? My understanding of all of this was so that readers could find authors, right?Anyways, I was curious about this question so I started asking people where I work and at my church about researching an author on the internet. Basically, I asked them if they ever looked up an author from a book that they had enjoyed reading. From the 12 people I talked to, only two of them said that they did actually look up an author at one time. I asked them how did they research this person. Both of them told me they went over to Facebook to see if they had a Facebook page. I never had any of them tell me they went to the author's website, or even to the search engine to see if they could find this author.
I started thinking about this myself. In all the time that I have been reading books, I've only looked up three authors. And, I have to admit that I did the same thing as the two people above did, I went to Facebook to see if they had a Facebook page. I have to admit, I never thought about going to the search engine, even though I use the search engine a lot for various things.
I guess the reason I am curious about all of this is that it seems as if this is highly debated on whether an author should have a personal website. I had a personal website at one time but after a year I decided not to renew the hosting or domain name on the site. Why you might be wondering. Well, the truth is I had placed a counter on my website and after a year of having the site, I checked the counter before it was time to renew my yearly website hosting and domain name and discovered that I only had 39 visitors to this site in one year. So after having paid a little over a hundred dollars for both hosting and a domain name, I couldn't see the value here in keeping it just because someone made some sort of author etiquette out here on the Internet on having a personal website.
Let's all be honest here, the reason any author has a website, a blog, and every social media presence is because we want our audience of readers to find us and buy our books, right? So my question once again is do authors need ten to twenty locations for a reader to find them or not? I know some authors will debate me on this, but for me, I say no.
If you are new or a continual reader to this blog I want you to know that this site wasn't created to tell you what to do, just to tell you what I've learned as an indie author since I self-published my first book back in 2012'. I think the biggest thing I have learned since then is as an indie author I am in charge of everything, including making all decisions in my publishing journey. If you are traditionally published your publisher will guide you in what you need to do. But, indie authors or those of you getting ready to self-publish for the first time will need to know that you are the President and CEO of yourself. So do you need to have an Internet presence everywhere? This will be something you have to decide and no one else can, although there will be people trying to tell you otherwise. All I am telling you here is what happened to me and what I had decided. Would I ever consider a personal website for E.S. Hart again? It would depend on a few factors such as; if my popularity grew and I knew that my readers would be looking for me at a personal website. When I become as popular as Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, E.L. James, Stephen King, or Nicholas Sparks, only then would I consider a personal website again. (But, once again, this is just me). You will have to decide if your budget can handle a personal website, if not you might want to consider just creating other type pages on social media sites and creating an author blog.
Once again, I am not telling you that you don't need any of these things if you are an author, or just getting ready to self-publish your first book. Like I said, this is something you're going to have to decide for yourself and the budget you want to lay out for this. I just feel that if you don't have the audience right now for the various sites then you are wasting your money here. I say spend your money on where your followers, friends, and fans are at. (But, once again this is just my personal feelings and you will have to decide this for yourself).
One last thing to remember, authors didn't always have the Internet and many of them did fine with reaching their audience of readers way back once upon a time. So you're going to have to decide in the end what fits you best and to stop listening to all the noise about what authors should or should not do in making their presence known to their readers. Remember, if you are self-published or getting ready to self-publish this is something you will be in charge of and no one else. Do what is right for you!
In my next blog entry, I'm going to talk about how readers look for books.
So stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment