In a prior post, we suggested that the time has come for publishers to have clear policies around what they should require from author web presences for an effective publishing partnership. This is a really complex and multi-faceted challenge for every publisher. The purpose of this post is to discuss that proposition in more detail, with a focus on how a publisher should approach developing those policies and the potential contractual relationship changes that they imply.
1. The first step is for a publisher to articulate their minimum standard for an author’s online presence. We have found that the role of web presences an author controls in helping Google and other search engines understand an author’s importance in context is routinely underappreciated. In addition to a properly-SEOd web site, publishers will want to make sure authors fill out their Amazon author page, their Google Plus profile, and their Goodreads page as well. All of this verbal metadata — along with images including photos and book covers — builds a strong foundation for discovery.
Obviously, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, and Pinterest (among others) could also be a constructive part of the web presence for many authors. A publisher’s thinking should include them too, taking cognizance of the fact that they are more important for some authors and topics than for others and that it is hard and cumbersome to do anything about them if the author doesn’t do it for him- or herself.
2. Although many, if not most, authors will have a website or the intention to create one, many others don’t. In that case, the publisher will want to have a fast, inexpensive, and effective way to put one up on the author’s behalf. (The non-website components of the foundation don’t lend themselves as readily to publisher assistance.)
For authors who either don’t have the skills to put up their own WordPress site or the budget to pay for a unique one to be designed and built for them, the publisher should provide a templated interactive process to create a site inexpensively. They also will have to do the research into key words, topics, and phrases to inform the SEO. We believe that for a publisher who will operate at scale, building dozens and perhaps hundreds of these sites per year, the cost should come down to $2,000 or less per site, perhaps $1,000 or less for first-time author sites that have minimal needs for unique book pages.
3. The sites should be seen as author sites which have pages for the individual titles on them, not book sites. That means the publisher has to accept the idea of putting all of an author’s work on the site, which definitely enhances the author’s online authority even though it may promote books from other publishers. Making a site that ignores an author’s whole output is superficially self-serving for a publisher, but it is actually counter-productive if the objective is to promote the author’s online presence and discoverability.
4. Of course, in more cases than not, the author will already have a site. In that case, the publisher won’t be building one but does need to assure itself that the existing site meets the SEO standard. The means an SEO check is necessary, using much of the same knowledge and techniques as the publisher would use to establish the right key words, phrases, and topics they’d use if they were building the site themselves. In addition, publishers should evaluate the site for user experience, including the speed of loading. We’ve seen many author sites which failed on that scale.
5. The publisher should also be giving authors advice about maximizing other opportunities. If the author might blog, suggestions about length, frequency, and topics are worthwhile as are very specific ideas about maximizing the other platforms like Facebook. The publishers should be giving authors a Wish List, making absolutely certain that no opportunity for author-based promotion is ignored because of a lack of awareness on the author’s part. By the same token, knowing what the author is doing enables coordinated marketing, such as the publisher’s own social presences being used to “like” or “favorite” or “recommend” what the author is doing. Doing these things will add to the publisher’s online authority as well as giving boosts to authors on a regular basis.
6. A number of publishing service companies and independent entities have created rosters of freelance service providers that can help authors with their publishing efforts. A lot of these — like cover designers or line editors — are not necessary for an author lucky enough to have a publisher. But we know that authors sometimes want help with ongoing content generation, from blogs to tweets. Although authors should obviously avoid handing over their online identities to surrogates they don’t even know (and that is not what is being suggested here), we know that busy authors can use help with what can be time-consuming social media. Publishers would be much smarter to develop their own list of trusted helpers for this kind of work, perhaps even instructing or training them in order for them to qualify for publisher referrals, than to allow these things to happen by accident or chance. (By the way, this might be a useful way to allow an employee who is on maternity leave or any other sabbatical to stay active from locations other than an office.)
7. Looking across a number of websites enables a publisher to see the impact of Google algorithm changes, which very few authors can do. (This will be particularly important on April 21, when Google starts “punishing” the ranking of sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.) Seeing the behavior of Google for different sites, those “whacked” by a change and those that aren’t (and changes to the algorithms occur all the time, not usually as dramatic or heralded as the one around mobile), allows insight into what needs to be done to benefit from the change, or at least avoid being punished. One person in a publishing house could be helping literally hundreds of authors stay optimized and avoid the need for each of these authors to know enormous amounts about SEO themselves. (Of course, it is also true that an author who is especially brilliant at SEO might not want a publisher focusing on the landing page she created that boosted traffic and teaching other authors to compete with it. Those authors are the exception, not the rule.)
This is not a capability we’ve seen publishers create for themselves, even though they can. We’d argue it is a great benefit for an author to be published by a house that has thought through these requirements and is providing an SEO check and research into search terms. Publishers should be doing this. The early movers will gain a temporary, but substantial, competitive advantage for themselves with authors and for their authors against the field.
8. What should be clear is that the author is being given a choice: they can build their own website (or do the tweaking necessary to one they already have to bring it up to standards) or they can have one built for them by the publisher from the templated choices the publisher offers.
9. This leaves two very large commercial questions for the publisher and author to negotiate, both of which should rise to the level of being covered in the contract. The first one revolves around the investment in and “ownership” of the author’s website and, perhaps the investments needed for ongoing marketing on the author’s behalf. Of course, there is nothing to discuss if the author builds and maintains her own site and social presences. The publisher should still provide all the help they can — SEO research at the beginning and analytics help all along — but there would be no reason for any compensation or publisher ownership.
However, if the publisher invests the dollars to build the author’s site or pays for any of the ongoing efforts by freelancers, there is definitely a negotiation to take place and there are a few moving parts to that negotiation. One way to address this might be for the publisher to advance the money for this work but have the opportunity to recoup it out of proceeds, as though it were part of the advance. Or the publisher could just render the author a bill for the site creation cost (remember, we’re positing $2,000 or less) which the author could simply pay. Another possibility is that the publisher might “own” the author’s website. That is not an end result we would recommend and, if it is necessary, there should be a “buy back” clause that enables the author to recover that ownership if, for example, they move on to another house. In any case, the point to these new elements in the author-publisher agreement is that they assure that what is necessary to optimize 21st century book publication is in place. Both partners in this arrangement — author and publisher — should want that to occur. It really should not be beyond the negotiating capabilities of the two parties to come to a fair agreement about how the necessary investments are compensated.
An approach that could evolve would be that houses have a “web site allotment”, making the sites they create “free”, but then they should pay that same amount in support of authors who create their own sites.
10. The other knotty element that should be negotiated is around the use of email lists that these optimized author sites will generate. It is self-destructive for either the author or the publisher to simply say “they’re mine!” Email list use has a lot of history, but best practices in cases like these are necessarily still evolving. For example, a publisher might build a mammoth email list by working with 10 authors with similar audiences for a promotion going across their email list base. Each author will benefit from being exposed to many readers of the other authors. Most authors will want that to happen if the opportunity is presented to them. Another possibility is that a house does a promotion and each author involved sends a personal note to his/her list letting them know about the promotion which, perhaps, could be a book signing or a webcast. The point is that the house has lists and the authors have lists, each can benefit from collaboration with the other and the house can create synergies by building joint efforts among authors.
These questions are complex but, while time passes, they are not getting any simpler. The value of the web and email list assets that can be optimized with cooperation is increasing, which means the cost of not doing this right is also increasing. It is simply not acceptable for every author and every publisher to avoid the discussion, leaving us with tens of thousands of entities operating in siloed vacuums. That’s the status quo. It isn’t satisfactory.