Authors & their booklists

I’m slowly starting to get back into the swing of things online again. It’s a slow process though let me tell you. Anyway, I was going through some backlinks here and noticed that there was one from Alison Kent’s blog to a post I did way back in June. Naturally, I had to check it out and since it’s been so long I figured I’d just add my own comments here.

First the links. She asks Is this True? in reaction to where I’d said author’s backlists/booklists pages instead of their entire sites were more important to readers than their entire site, at least initially. It’s a good question and, in light of some of the great comments that came in response to it, I feel like I should clarify what I was getting at then. I do stand by that comment.

The thing is, I don’t mean and I never meant that an author’s booklist is the only thing a reader would be interested in on an author’s website. It is, however, an extremely important item for a reader. An improperly designed or presented one can be extremely frustrating for readers all way around.

Rule number one is the design. This isn’t rocket science. It is in fact, writing 101. In fact, I’m continually amazed at how many people who supposedly make their living or want to make their living writing don’t appear to understand the basic concept of a simple bibliography. A simple one, notice. Not a fancy, no holds barred, graphic intensive one, mind you. I’m not saying cover art and graphics can’t be fun to look at but, and in this case it is a big but, they do not belong on a printable bibliography page. Individual information pages about the books, yes, but not a printable page. Talk to your web-techie person. If they don’t know what I’m talking about, fire them and get someone else. I can’t put it any plainer than that.

A subset of this one is the connections between books. While not an actual part of strict bibliographies that I know of, it is part of the information readers are looking for. So either list the books in chronological order with notations on connections or in some way denote those connections without complicating that list. Just above all, keep it simple and printable.

The second major thing is presentation or, in web terms, navigation. If readers can’t find the booklist, what good does it do them? I’ve run across some authors that actually have pretty good booklists, all set up to be printable and everything, with links to individual book descriptions complete with nice easily loadable cover graphics. Finding the basic list in the first place, however, was like going on a @#$%#$%@#$ treasure hunt. Not exactly the main point of an author site, I would think.

So here’s my question, if authors feel that readers aren’t utilizing their booklists all that much currently and therefore booklists couldn’t be all that important to readers over other things like blogs and bios, could it not be possible that they, the authors, might have the cart before the horse? Is it possibly conceivable that if they instead made their booklists a more prominent feature, if not the most prominent feature, and simplified it to a printable easily usable format, then that statistic might change drastically?

Just a thought though.

Of course, that also assumes the rest of the site is appealing, too, and I’m not going there today. 😀

Hey, I never said I didn’t like looking at other things on author’s sites. The thing is, for the most part I may only visit those other features once when I first learn about an author or their site. I check out their bio, scan through the entire site, etc, etc. If they have a blog and I like their blog voice, then I may subscribe to it. I do occasional go to an author site just for information about the author that isn’t book related but the primary reason I return to a favorite, and even a not so favorite, author’s site is to check to see if there is a new book out I might’ve missed.

So, the third thing to add to the list above is letting readers and other visitors know when that booklist is updated and they need to reprint it. Yes, we are obsessive. We are your loyal readers. Is that not what you want? 😉