Dec 12 2006
New Report Says Author Presence Online Is Important
The advertising firm of Spiers New York conducted a survey which revealed that 18% of readers have visited a publisher’s website and 23% have visited an author’s website. So, I guess if you don’t have an online presence, you may be missing out on giving nearly a quarter of your potential readership information on your books. I’ve been an active proponent of author websites. It doesn’t make sense to me in this day and age, not to have a website despite some demurrers of publishers to the contrary. Via Publisher’s Weekly.
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Dec 12, 2006 @ 10:40:13
Very interesting. I expected that the number would probably be a bit higher than was generally supposed, but I didn’t expect it would be as high as this. Though I’d be very interested to know what the number is for “usually visit authors’ websites” as opposed to “visited one author’s website once”.
Dec 12, 2006 @ 13:52:36
If I like a book I will go to their website to see what else they have available. If I REALY liked the book I will click the contact link and send an email thanking the author for the entertainment.
So. In my case the author having a website does not usually lure me to try a book by that author initially but it is a tool to find more books once I’ve discovered the author. Except …
Do you think those figures are reflecting Ellora’s Cave and the e-pubs stats? That is a great book shopping experience. Almost all of them provide link throughs to the author sites and you can scan through the reviews, snippets of their writing style and see what else they’ve written before clicking buy … all with a glass of wine at midnight.
Someone should take a poll and see what the percentages are for why readers visit author sites. I think the results would be interesting.