AuthorHouse Blog

In writing my book, I’ve spent quite a bit of time testing various blog platforms to recommend to authors. During the last month, I’ve set up blogs on the following platforms:

• Blogger.com (Google)
• Typepad.com
• Wordpress.com

LiveJournal.com is a popular platform as well, but it is very similar to Typepad.com so I saved myself some time by focusing on these three.

One might think that all blog platforms are basically the same. What separated the good from the bad in my opinion was these factors:

1. Ease of use
2. Price
3. Ability to customize

I had a little bit of a head start with Blogger about 18 months ago when I first started blogging. They had just been aquired by Google so I figured they would be the best, right? Wrong. Blogger was easy to set-up, just as the homepage said (”easy as 1-2-3″). However, the big downfall was once it was live, you really had to get a crash course in programming to add any functionality to it, including links in your sidebar. However, within the last few months, Blogger has added a lot more functionality in their free blog service. A lot more. It is still easy to use, but they have added the ability to implement “widgets” to the sidebar, including seamless AdSense integration. They also now offer a “hosted” version of Blogger, allowing you to have your domain (www.TomBritt.com) point to and be hosted by Google…for free! What a deal.

Typepad is a little deeper on the functionality and design templates, but they also charge $4.95+ a month. Is it worth the $4.95+ a month? In my opinion, not really. The other two blog platforms allowed you to edit pages, posts, and sidebar items from the blog itself. You don’t have to login to some content management system to edit a typo in your blog. Typepad keeps forcing you to login to their homepage to access the backside of your blog. Once you are logged in, the navigation is a bit clunky and hard to understand. Their integration with Widgetbox.com is kinda slick, and if adding a lot of widget ornaments on your blog is important, Typepad might be a viable option. At the end of my 30-day trial, I promptly cancelled the account and found no reason to continue paying the measely $4.95 a month (I never upgraded, wasn’t worth it).

One of my favorite blog platforms by far was Wordpress.com. It is an open source coded blog platform. What this means is that programmers all over the world are writing free code, plug-ins, and functionality that you can download and install to your blog: free. What blew me away was all the design “themes” you can choose from to start your blog. There are literally thousands of design themes to choose from. The only catch with Wordpress is you can’t put advertising links, banner ads, or AdSense on your blog. Like Blogger, Wordpress is also free and they provide domain hosting as well. If having ads is important, you can download the Wordpress.org (different web site) platform and host the software wherever you like. A little caution, unless you are a programmer or have a few free weekends to torture yourself, don’t go down this road. I got sucked into it and lost two weeks of writing on my book because of it.

So who do I recommend to authors? There was one clear winner: Blogger. For the functionality, ease of use, ability to customize the sidebar and monetize the traffic, you can’t beat Blogger. Had I written this post three months ago, the results would have been different. But when you look at why authors blog, they aren’t looking to learn a whole new programming language. Authors want to write, have spellcheck, have drag and drop page elements to move around, control the colors of the fonts and templates, and have something they can build on down the road. As you become more familiar with Blogger (or just get bored), you can always upgrade or move your blog to one of the other platforms with one of their migration tools. Both Typepad and Wordpress had a tool that would import your Blogger blog contents, comments, and posts into your new platform. But given what I know about Blogger, you won’t be running to another competitor anytime soon. Have fun!

Authors are always looking for an impartial, 3rd party review of their books. Sure, you can send 50 copies out to newspaper book reviewers and join “the pile” on their desks. Or, you can hire someone to write a review online through ReviewMe.com!

ReviewMe.com is a marketplace for bloggers that have an expertise in a particular area to meet with people that want their product or service reviewed. Once your book is reviewed, the reviewer will post it on their blog, exposing your book to their captive audience.

Cost? Depends on who you hire (the more expensive ones have more traffic or influence), but it can range from $20 to $200. I would suggest finding someone that writes reviews about books in your particular genre or are regionally close to you.

Ever wonder how much web traffic the other authors get? “They said they get thousands of hits a month, their web site must be smokin’!” You probably think that just because an author is well-known, has a publisher, or does a lot of book signings that they have an equally as busy web site. Here’s a little secret…

Let me introduce you to Alexa.com. This company tracks the web sites that users of their Alexa toolbar visit, ranking the top 1 million sites in order of most traffic to least traffic. The top 5 trafficked web sites according to Alexa are:

1. Yahoo.com
2. MSN.com
3. Google.com
4. Baidu.com
5. YouTube.com

Visit your favorite, or most arrogant, authors’ web sites and see what kind of ranking they have. At first, the ranking won’t mean a lot to you because their ranking is all relative to other peoples’ web sites. But you DO know your own web sites’ traffic, right? (please tell me you do) Use your web site, or a friend’s web site that has an Alexa ranking, and use it as your benchmark. From there, you can see how their web sites really stack up.

One benchmark you can use is my local portal web site, atGeist.com. My Alexa ranking is usually around 130,000-150,000. I average around 4,500-5,000 unique visitors a month. If you want to see my stats, just visit this link. I have another web site, atFishers.com, and it’s a newer web site with an Alexa ranking of 220,000 with around 4,000 unique visitors a month. The top 1,000 web sites are all getting over 5 million unique visitors a month, so it is a pretty elite club. If you web site or blog can get in the top 800,000 consider yourself lucky.

I recommend downloading this toolbar, installing it into your Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, or Netscape browser so you can see instantly the ranking of every web site you visit. You’ll be surprised at where authors’ web sites really rate in cyberspace.

I spoke with Sony today about their recently launched eBook Reader and they seem to be getting a lot of positive press. It seems that eBook readers of old have had problems with adoption by the public, but the new Sony eBook Reader is approaching this a little different. First, they made the Reader about 6″x9″, the same size as most paperback novels. They also partnered with major publishing houses to provide digital downloadable versions of their best sellers through their Connect web site. Lastly, they have a digital rights management system to protect an author’s copyrights. So what could help Sony, and the publishers, get more traction?

Enter Google. They announced earlier this year that they are going to start offering eBook sales through the Google Book Search program. They are entering the eBook arms race as well, leveraging their relationships with publishers and authors that they have developed in their four-year quest to make every book searchable. In addition to providing links to buy a searched book online through Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com, they will provide a link to “download eBook” from the same preview screen. There are rumors that Amazon is also coming out with an eBook reader that will be more sophisticated than Sony’s handheld device.

With Google and Amazon getting into this space, what more validation do you need that eBooks are the distribution model to watch in 2007?

http://tombritt.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Amway meets the book industry: Bookwise. Best-selling author Richard Paul Evans (”The Christmas Box”) and financial advisor and author Robert Allen have teamed up to offer an online book club that offers members discounted books, live webcasts with national authors, best-selling author seminars, tax help, etc. Cost is $35 to get in the door and $30/month. Sounds a lot like Pre-Paid Legal or Amway. Thanks to Steve Weber’s blog for scouting this out: Plug Your Book: A new take on book clubs: Bookwise

I was recently at the San Diego State University Writers’ Conference giving my talk on “Leveraging the Internet to Market Your Book” when a lightbulb went off in my head. Over the past 10 years, I’ve tried to stay up with the growth, adoption, and technology around the Internet as more of a hobby than anything. What I’ve come to realize is the vast digital divide between those folks like myself that stay up with the Internet and those that do not. Authors are a unique group of people, a group that has been greatly affected by the adoption of the Internet, Amazon.com, and online book sales; however, they don’t know how to leverage what is out there. They are also afraid of stepping otu and trying something new, like blogging for example. On the plane ride home, I started outlining the book I had in my head to help authors, both aspiring and published. Wish me luck, I hope to have it done in April in time to debut at the Indianapolis WriteStuff Writers’ Conference in my backyard. As I talk to authors about this project, they all see a need for something like this. Let’s face it, writers also buy books so I have a built in audience for this already!

http://tombritt.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Thanks to my friend Joe Wikert, I can now describe the type of publishing atGeist and atFishers provides: Blog-esque. I’ve struggled with how to describe the type of publication we print for three years. We aren’t your typical journalists since it is all community driven. We don’t tell both sides of a story, we don’t have three sources for every story, and we don’t care if we upset people. So, we’re sitting at an atFishers networking meeting last month which Joe attended and he says, “oh, your publication is ‘blog-esque’ in content.”

That was easy.

Thanks Joe for the ah-ha moment, and thanks for coming. If you haven’t checked out Joe’s Publishing 2020 blog, I highly recommend that you do.

http://tombritt.blogspot.com/atom.xml