As technology grows at an astounding pace, authors need to keep up with the latest innovations. Yes, I know, it’s already tough enough to tackle the whole idea of book marketing. Many of us just want to write the book, step back, and let someone else do the labor of getting it out to our audience. If your bank account is flush with money, then you could hire it all out. But, let’s face it, many of us either struggle financially or we are getting by with just enough. Here is where helpful tools come into play. I hope that over time you will begin to find more and more of these resources on this blog and across our SLPA social media sites to help you navigate this technology and sell more books.

Personal computers and laptops may always be around, not just because they are the first computers, but because every office has one. However - computers and laptops are not what your reader audience is using to engage on your author platform. It is on their Smartphone. Nearly everyone is busy these days and so getting information on-the-go is essential. We are using voice-activated Google searching and videos are fast becoming the medium for information acquisition. Your author platform needs to keep pace with these trends.

One of the things you can do is to make sure your author website and social media channels look appealing in mobile form. Generally it is in this format that your content will be viewed.

To give you a personal example, I recently overhauled my website timothyyohe.com with what I thought was a cool template. I like to use the free ones because I have an incredibly low budget for writing. After I set it all up, I decided to take a look at the site in the mobile version. It looked terrible. The wording ran off both sides of the screen and the pictures were either too large or too small. I needed a different template.

I use Wordpress.com for my site and so I went back into the template section, clicked the “FREE” box, and put the word “mobile” in the search bar. When I simply clicked the “FREE” box earlier for templates, it gave a list of 122. With the refined search of “mobile,” Wordpress narrowed it down to 16. So, if you use the free templates for your author website, make sure you pick from one of the 16 listed. Otherwise… your website will look like mine did – a mobile disaster. Nothing will drive away your audience faster than an author website that cannot be read from a Smartphone. 

- Timothy Yohe

Social Media Director for the St. Louis Publishers Association