marketing – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

Ideas for Revamping the Website

I have been watching some YouTube videos today about how to sell books on Amazon. The speaker showed the Amazon pages of authors who sell lots of books. While he talked about keywords (which are important) I looked at the page layout, colors, and number of books listed, which were a lot for each other. Long story short, I started thinking about how I can change some things on the website to sell more books. Rethinking keywords is just a part of the overall plan.

The obvious thing hit me a few minutes ago. I should check out the websites of famous authors and learn from them instead of assorted unknown hacks on YouTube. Don’t get me wrong. I love YouTube and watch it way more than any other channel and there are a lot of pros and artists on there, but I have been paying more attention to the hacks lately.

I checked out stephenking.com, danbrown.com, jkrowling.com, and jgrisham.com. Again the obvious hit me. First, unlike my website, theirs are not weblogs. Theirs are primarily about their books. But their websites are more than simple bookstores.

Each author’s works fall into a genre, a theme, or a certain atmosphere. In effect, each author builds his/her own universe. The websites, intentionally or not, draw the reader into that universe. For example, Stephen King’s universe is one of horror while J.K. Rowling’s is one of magic and youth. Dan Brown’s universe is one of mysterious symbols. Authors exist in parallel universes.

Therefore I need to do some literary navel-gazing and decide what my universe is and draw the reader into that. Each of my works is a doorway into that universe.

Anyway, those are my revelations for the night. I must go to bed. I know this is all very obvious, but sometimes the answer is in front of you all along and you have to bang your head into it accidentally in order to realize it’s there.

More to come. I will be revamping the website soon.

Titles Available Now in my Amazon Store

The following works are now available at my Amazon page: amazon.com/author/philslattery.

The new cover for A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror as of November 15, 2019. — Available on Kindle. A revamped print edition is coming soon.

The Blonde cover fo The Scent and Other Stories — Available on Kindle and in Print

The new cover for Click as of November 15, 2019. — Available on Kindle and in Print

Available on Kindle and in Print. Note this story is included in A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror.

Available on Kindle and in Print. Note: These stories are included in A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror.

Shadows and Stars is my first, full-fledged novel. It is a science-fiction tale about a scientist who invents a portal and transports to an alien world where he becomes caught up in a revolution. I am finishing the first draft. The final draft will probably not require many changes. At approximately 135,000 words, it will be about 300 pages in 6 x9 format. This is how I visualize the cover currently.

Shadows and Stars cover 2 — Coming hopefully soon.

Photo of man wearing a coronavirus mask — Prevent the spread of Coronavirus/COVID-19 for the sake of yourself, your friends, and your family.

Marketing: New Headers for the Website

The other day I was surfing through Pixabay.com searching for header material, when I came across some strikingly beautiful abstract designs. Tonight I created some headers from them. Let me know what you think. I think that by making my website more appealing to the eye, I will attract more visitors and thus more potential buyers of my works.

Marketing: Three New Headers

I added three more headers to my rolling headers on the homepage of this website. Two feature well-known authors and one is advertising for my poetry collection, Nocturne.

I added three more headers to my rolling headers on the homepage of this website. I am becoming a bit more proficient with Pixlr. Instead of simply cropping a public domain photo, I created a background and pasted a photo on it along with text. I will start adding more headers with photos of my favorite authors. This may bring a few more visitors when my site pops up in search results for these authors. Of course, I am including the authors’ names in the metadata for the photo so that it will be searchable.

I also created a header for my poetry collection Nocturne, but with this I again cropped a public domain photo and added some text. I am not real happy with the lower text stating Nocturne‘s availability. The color does not have enough contrast from the background in part of it, but I didn’t want it to distract too much from the title either.

Let me know what you think.

Marketing: Two More New Headers for the Website

I made two more headers for my website. These have an obvious horror bias. Let me know what you think. I hope that by making the site more attractive and visually stimulating, I will attract more dedicated, repeat readers and not just someone who happens to find my site in a search (though those are welcome too, of course).

Comments?

Marketing: New Headers for My WordPress Website

I am taking full advantage of randomizing the headers on my WordPress website. The headers I have developed so far are designed primarily to be attractive and to identify the website. However, soon I will be developing more headers that will promote my books with one header for each book. If I am feeling creative, I may start developing more than one for each book. Below are the ones I have so far.

Note that posting them here, a button pops up to post each on Pinterest. That is another I am putting them all here. After posting them, I will post each header on Pinterest too for even greater exposure.

I like to kill two marketing birds with one stone.

I am learning a few tricks as I go. The biggest one is to keep the text to the vertical center of the banner, because the header frame may crop the tops and bottoms a little.

All the photos are from the public domain, either pixabay.com or pexels.com.

For my photo editor for cropping and text I use Pixlr.com, which is free.

These are very easy to do and improve the look of the site immensely and keep the site from being boring by repeating one header image endlessly.

Comments?

Banner for LinkedIn — Also my new banner for LinkedIn as of August 19, 2020

new twitter banner — Also my new Twitter banner

Comments?

Update on “Murder by Plastic”

This being Veteran’s Day, I had the day off. I intended to spend most of the day writing on Shadows and Stars, on which I have spent a few hours so far, but I have also accomplished something else. After some editing, I submitted the stage version of “Murder by Plastic” my flash fiction thriller, to Lakeshore Players Theatre 17th Annual Ten-Minute Play Festival. I should know if I am a semi-finalist by the end of January.

Phil Slattery portrait — Phil Slattery March, 2015

The Lakeshore Players do not pay a lot, therefore for me the reward is more publicity and exposure for me and my works (should I win, of course). Sometimes this is more valuable than the financial rewards. This is how I feel about short stories and flash fiction. Short stories, for most of us, pay little if anything. The biggest payment to an author is in the exposure. It keeps your name in front of the public.

I am also finding out that there is more than one way to gain exposure as a writer. There is the publication of the work itself , the pre-publication publicity, and the subsequent sales and critical opinions (which, granted, may be good or bad) and renown if it a popular work. And there is the publicity to be gained by writing about the creative process and/or publicizing it before the work is published. Everything I see about publicizing and marketing one’s works boils down to getting one’s name in font of the public as often as one can. This often involves blowing one’s horn for the most miniscule of reasons.

As you may have noticed, getting my name before the public is what this article is doing right now.

Comments?

A public service reminder from Phil Slattery

Update Nov. 7, 2020, 1:19 a.m: A Few Booksellers Carrying My Works

Here are a few of the book retailers where you can find my works.

Yesterday, I became curious as to what booksellers I could find that carry my works now that I am publishing through IngramSpark. I went to different bookstores online and simply searched for the ISBN of the new edition of A Tale of Hell and Other Works of Horror, after which I searched for “Phil Slattery” to see which of my Amazon books they carry. To my pleasant surprise, I found that most of the major bookstores carry both. I also found out that IngramSpark also distributes through Amazon, because the new edition of A Tale of Hell popped up there in each site for the US and other countries.

In any case, here are the bookstores where you can order each of my works via print-on-demand, i.e. you have to order them from the store. Also, if you are looking specifically for my latest version (i.e. the IngramSpark edition), use its ISBN to ensure you get it and not one of the earlier Amazon editions: 9780578759913. Search the bookstore for “Phil Slattery” to get one of my other works, which are available through Amazon.

Don’t forget to retweet and share this post with your friends.

Bookshop.org

Books A Million

Parnassus Books (Nashville, TN)

Wordsworth Books (LittleRock, Arkansas)

Joseph Beth (Lexington, KY)

The Strand Bookstore (New York City, NY)

Book People (Austin, TX)

Collected Works (Santa Fe, NM)

Elliott Bay Bookstore (Seattle, WA)

Word Bookstores (Brooklyn, NY and Jersey City, NJ)

Blackwells.co.uk

bookdepository.com (UK)

allibris.com (UK)

literatibookstore.com

Also check the Amazon page for each county (e.g. amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.uk, etc.

Cover of A Tale of Hell by Phil Slattery

Happy Halloween!

Here’s wishing each of you a fun Halloween!

As you no doubt noticed, I have selected another theme style for my website. After having had the last one for several years, I re-evaluated it and decided to improve my marketing and branding by improving the readability of my website. Therefore, I chose a simpler design (not surprisingly called “Hemingway Rewritten”) with higher contrast then enlarged the font and simplified it by going with a non-serif similar to Word’s popular Arial. I also designed a better header in which I used a public domain image available from Pixabay.com. I think these few touches will improve its readability greatly. I will be tweaking the website over the next few weeks. Though it is still way too early to tell, I may be getting a few more visitors than usual this morning, but we will see how it’s going after a week.

Let me know your thoughts on the new design and if you have any recommendations.

Don’t forget to like, comment, and follow.

Hasta luego.