"Everyone knows that it has to be done," said moderator Charlotte Abbott as she opened yesterday morning's session on e-strategies for authors and publishers. "The question is how to do it" in a timely, creative way that gets results.
Addressing an audience largely comprised of publishers, panelists Ron Hogan, curator of Beatrice.com, Jason Ashlock, principal at Movable Type Literary Group, and Kathleen Schmidt, director of publicity and digital media, Shreve Williams Public Relations, agreed on many things: building and maintaining an online author presence is necessary; it both drives and builds audience; it must be done with the purpose of engaging readers; and authors have to be in it for the long-term.
The key, the panelists agreed, is determining your goals and entering the world of Twitter, Facebook and blogging with a plan, a purpose and an agenda. Authors must know their goals. Is it to spread awareness? To brand yourself? To build your audience? "Build it and they will come," is wrong, Schmidt said. "You can't put content on the web today and just expect people to find it."
For Ashlock's Movable Type authors, the agency spends several weeks searching the Internet--Twitter, Facebook forums, Tumbler and elsewhere--to find where the relevant conversations are happening. "It's important to use the results you get in a very organic way," Hogan said. "As an author online, your long-term goal is to insert yourself into the conversation as a fascinating person who has something interesting to say."
No one likes the hard sell on Twitter, Schmidt concurred. "What you're doing as an author is engaging people there."
"If you're going to have a presence online, you need it before publication, during publication and after publication," Schmidt said. The others agreed, citing bestselling authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner as examples of authors who use their websites and blogs to build, maintain and engage with their audiences.
How to best do it? An author’s website is home base, and daily Tweets, weekly newsletters, blogs, and Facebook forums are "your tentacles out into the community," Schmidt said. The goal is always to drive readers back to the home base, i.e., the author website.
Hogan advises authors to use the time between contract and pub date to explore and build the online presence. "The six weeks before, during and after publication it's important to be online as much as possible," Schmidt said.
Some hands-on tips from the panel: use search.twitter.com to find conversations relevant to your author's topic; use Bit.ly and Google to track how people arrive at the author site. Ashlock added that have a new role in bringing authors, publishers and publicists together, serving "as the linchpin between all parties."
"It's important to remember at the end of the day that you want people to buy your book," Schmidt said. "Word of mouth is very powerful, and that's really what we're talking about here."--Laurie Lico Albanese