Publisher Web Site Advice

Perspectives Press is a small press that specializes in the area of books on and about infertility treatment and adoption. They are a superb niche publisher whose titles I have reviewed with great personal satisfaction and high recommendation for several years. Yesterday I received their newest catalog and inserted into it was a one-page flyer titled "7 Great Reasons to Visit Our Web Site Regularly."

There were seven essential bits of advice offered that I believe would well serve any small press publisher developing a Web site as a key part of an overall marketing strategy and which I will here adapt for this posting:

1. Keep your Web site updated weekly.
2. Have your Web site carry the complete table of contents for each of your nonfiction books along with snips from their reviews. If it's fiction, poetry or a cookbook substitute a passage, a poem or a recipe for a table of contents entry.
3. Your Web site should contain photos and biographical information about each of your authors, and details about their upcoming speaking schedules. Put in your own photo and bio along with your publishing house "mission statement," what you are all about as a publisher of the kinds of titles you produce.
4. Carry up-to-date news from your particular niche on your Web site, including information about thematically appropriate workshops and symposia; a "Did You Know" section as part of a weekly "newsletter" page; a section sharing information about a worthwhile product or service or book from a thematically appropriate company or organization or publisher other than yourself; and links to selected Web sites that you think will be found interesting and/or helpful to readers of your particular category(s) of publications.
5. Have your Web site contain a "writers' guideline" for manuscript submissions, and an updated list of topics that you'd be interested in publishing.
6. Your Web site should also offer a weekly-changing "bargain books" page or section featuring copies that have been returned from bookstores or distributors but are still in reasonable condition. Also offer a limited number of one particular title at absolute rock bottom prices (sort of "The Bargain of the Week") to keep people coming back and back and back.
7. Your Web site should also provide fast and easy access to an expanding number of fact sheets and articles germane to your particular publisher orientation that visitors to your Web site could print out and use for their own purposes (school curriculums supplementation, speech ideas, reference files, group discussions, etc.).

I would recommend that you visit the Perspectives Press Web site to see how this advice has been translated into a small press publisher's truly effective, niche oriented, marketing strategy-savvy Web site. You will find them at:

Go thou and do likewise!

Jim Cox
Midwest Book Review

James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
phone: 1-608-835-7937
e-mail: mbr@execpc.com
e-mail: mwbookrevw@aol.com
http://www.midwestbookreview.com

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