Sillybean

Website Content: The Book List

Or, How Not to List Your Books in Such a Way as to Make Your Readers Rend Their Garments in Despair.

Another common question from the RWA talk: “What content should the site have?” Or, put another way, “What do readers want?”

I like this question. I’m going to talk about it at great length, but for now I want to focus on the one thing every single author’s website should contain: a list of their books. (I was going to say “that every author’s website contains,” but I ran across one recently that, mind-bogglingly, didn’t, so I’m sticking with “should.”)

Admittedly, this is pretty much a no-brainer. But there are a lot of ways the basic book list could be better.

Some suggestions:

• Note which books are out of print. Note which books were written under another name. Note which ones won awards.
• Link all books to a store of some kind. Link to any store you like, but link somewhere. Even out of print books can be linked to a used book search site like isbn.nu.
• If a local store keeps signed copies of your books, mention that on your site and include a link to the store if they’re online. If they’re not, provide a phone number.

Linking to bookstores: a digression

This comes down to your personal philosophy on bookstores - Amazon is evil because they list used books alongside new ones; B&N is evil because they drove your local mystery shop out of business. Whatever. Here’s mine: don’t dictate to me where to buy. Offer me links to the store that has the most information about your books. Now, for the foreseeable future, that means Amazon or B&N. But keep in mind that linking directly to those sites does not mean your readers will necessarily buy there; what they will do is note the cover appearance, the price, and the reader reviews. If they’re already Amazon or B&N customers, they might buy there. They’re just as likely to drive to their neighborhood store and scan the shelves for that cover.

Linking to Booksense is wonderful in theory. In practice, it falls short. Booksense offers almost no information about a book. It won’t let you learn more until you enter your zip code, and then it’ll give you a list of member stores to choose from, and then if you’re very, very good and the local store has a decent website, you might find a blurb. What if there are no stores nearby? My closest Booksense store is an hour away, but there are half a dozen bookstores within five miles of my house.

Consider linking your out of print books to something like isbn.nu. This will give your readers an instant snapshot of the resale market price on your old titles. Even if you see no royalties from used sales, those will help readers determine whether to buy your next new title.

end of digression

Back to the book list. It’s all too easy to rant, and I’m trying to stay positive here, but here are some stupid author tricks I’ve seen recently:

• Putting the book list in a drop-down menu or some such silly gizmo instead of right there on the page.
• Pretending out of print books don’t exist.
• Listing books that aren’t out yet without mentioning this fact in any way.

Don’t be that guy.

Shopping List

I’d like to see more authors offer a shopping list – a print-friendly list containing only the basic info (title, format, in print or not) that I can take with me on my next bookstore run. Including thumbnails of the covers would be great too, if you can fit them on the page, but this could get messy if a book’s been reprinted with half a dozen covers. I’ll settle for a neat, complete text list.

This is the most forehead-slappingly simple thing an author could put on her site to help her readers find her books in stores. No one does it.

Series Books

Allow me to belabor a point that should be obvious. Your readers don’t know as much about your books as you do. They don’t know which book is first in the series unless you tell them.

So, OK, you’ve listed them in order. But is that the first book at the top of the page, or the most recent? Please, make it really obvious. Number them, or put the publication year in there somewhere, do something to help out the clueless git who’d like to read your work but doesn’t know where to start.

“But they could look that up at [Amazon|the ISFDB|the front of one of my books],” says the author. BZZZT. Your reader has now left your website frustrated. Game over. Thanks for playing. NEXT!

YOU are the authority on your books. Never send your readers elsewhere.

Short Stories

If there are short stories that are related to one of your books, please include them in the list. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to stumble across a ten-year-old story in some antho and think “OMG! It’s a Jack-and-Bob story I never knew about!� I mean, those discoveries are sort of fun in a way, but why didn’t the reader know about the stories before? List those, dammit. Poppy Brite does this really well with her character lists.

Fun Extras

My favorite author sites are the ones that give me a little extra info about each book. It’s like watching the director’s cut DVD; if you’re lucky, you get deleted scenes, commentary, and other goodies besides the trailer. All it takes is creating a page per book and using it to collect links to excerpts, interviews, deleted scenes, what music you listened to while writing… anything interesting about the book that isn’t in the book.

Jennifer Crusie has, in this regard, the best site ever. It has, among other things:

• the first chapter of every book (well, except the novella)
• the extra long version of a scene that was cut down for Faking It
• the chicken marsala recipe that figures prominently in Bet Me
• songs and movie quotes from Welcome to Temptation
• pet photos, which would normally be a turnoff except these were the models for the characters’ pets (and they’re adorable)
• foreign covers; original covers for reissued books

This is the kind of thing that keeps me coming back to her site. There’s no discussion board or anything interactive at all; I just have to go look at the puppy photos again every time I reread one of her books.

What do you think?

I’ll admit I’m bitter about particular things, like the site for the umpteen-book series that didn’t indicate which was the first book or which ones were out of print, or the site where the book list for each series was in a separate drop-down menu so you could never get a complete list, or the author with one novel and a dozen short stories who didn’t identify which stories related to the novel.

These are my peeves. What are yours? Got any more examples of really cool book lists?