PROVE IT WITH A MINI-SITE
Have you ever known something was true? Deep down in your gut
where it matters most? Something everybody around you also
knows? Have you been there, yet something deep inside just won't
buy it? Well, I'm in that fix right now. I have been for years.
Ebook fiction won't sell. I know it's so. And so do most.
Likely you do as well. Folks curl up in a chair, sprawl on the
couch, lounge in the bath tub, and so forth to read fiction.
Hey, this is the way it is! Still ...
You see I love fiction. I love to read it. And I loved writing
it for many years. (I even sold a novel, "Fatal Games," Pageant
Press, 1989) And I'd love to write another tale. But I don't
want to pay the price to print it. With a minimum order of a
thousand copies at $4-$5/copy? (And don't talk to me about
print-on-demand; I've been there and seen that.) So maybe an
ebook. Maybe.
I've been saying this ever since I first heard ebooks. But I
have never tried one. Now I'm going to do it. The risk?
About 40 hours and 40 bucks. I've a dandy tale ready to go.
Sure, all may go down the drain. In which case, I'll really
know. But there's that outside chance, like the 40-1 long shot
in the race, that at least *some* people *will* read fiction in
the ebook format. So I'm going to ...
Go To BizMinisites.Com (The sales
pitch is at )
They have a neat plan for mini-site builders. You get 500K of
disk and lots of supporting extras, all for $9.95 per quarter.
Heck, that's not much more than $3/month. And it's a smooth
running service. Great download times. You don't even need a
domain name, but you can use one if you like.
Next Stop? GoTo.Com
I'll hunt up the keyword suggestion tool at
I'll enter some obvious choices. "Male fiction" and "male
adventure," for these are the catagories into which the tale
fits.
There's no telling how much time this will take, because I've
simply got to find keywords actually being entered. Then select
from those entered most often the ones that are as close to the
above as I can find. This is a critcal step, for there's no
point optimizing a page for keywords nobody uses.
Then it's off to Google to enter my keywords there. I'll be
looking at counts of pages that come up on each phrase, hoping
to find some low. Those with the highest counts at GoTo
(Demand), and lowest counts at Google (Supply) will become the
set of keywords I'll use.
Building Site Content
Here's where the time may fly. It takes a while to figure what
to write about. Topics that work well with the keyword phrases
selected. The home page will be the sales presentation, with the
major content that blurb you see on the backs of some paperbacks
in bookstores. Something to hook the reader into wanting to read
the book.
I haven't a fixed idea about actual content. Maybe something of
the task of writing in the male adventure genre. Some more about
why it is no longer being published. I can't say until I have
those keywords.
The object here is to have all pages point directly to male
adventure or male fiction, thus creating a small theme site,
currently popular with some search engines.
The catch is that it's tough to write an optimized page for the
search engines that also works well with visitors. But it's got
to happen. And it can take time. (For suggestions about creating
such a page, send any email to
)
The Launch
I'll upload the pages, double check them, then head for the
search engines. Next, I'll get on about serious business, and
wait a time. It takes a while these days to get listed.
I may take a crack at the pay-per-click search engines, just to
get hits more quickly. But to play this game seriously, you need
hard data on hits versus sales.
Something Different
I'm going to use an approach that again is not supposed to work
with fiction. However, it works great with How To titles, so
I'll give it a try.
I'll let visitors download the book and read the first 50 to 60
pages or so. They will order only if interested in reading the
rest of it.
Checking And Testing
With the above, the site purpose becomes very simple: Generate
a download of the book. This is a lot easier to achieve than
actually closing the sale. Given any hits at all, the
effectiveness of the site in getting this job done will be easy
to measure.
Of course the bottom line is, 1) Will anybody be interested?
And 2), if so, will anybody buy? That last one is going to be a
cliff hanger for a time.
What Next?
Given sales, I'll know 1) # of hits to get a download, #2) # of
downloads to get a sale. Thus I'll know the value of a hit.
Sure, it will be soft data; you can't be sure until counts get
into the thousands. But hey, if $100/month seems likely, with
upside potential, here's what I'll do.
Launch More Sites I have five other manuscripts that are equally
good. So I'll put them up as described above. If results are
equally good, I'll build a central site, still themed, to which
the original sites are satelites. Then ...
Watch My Dust
I'll open the site to other quality work, perferably in genres
no longer published. There are a lot of people like myself
around who have written good tales that never made it into print.
If It Works
I'll be into a site that cost many hundreds of hours to put
together, particularly when you add in some scheme for deciding
upon new titles to offer and converting them to ebooks. Dollar
costs might be more than $4000. But it will be a winner, for I
will have demonstrated at every step along the way that there
are enough people who will read ebook fiction to make it fly.
An Unwarrented Risk If Built From Scratch
In the paragraph above, I consider a fuzzy view of the future,
one that may not come about. But look at the difference in risk
of time and dollars. To build the above, then finally accept
failure a year out would be a disaster.
But with the minimal risks in putting together that first
mini-site, hey, this is going to be fun. I can easily afford a
little time and a few bucks. And what if it pays off?
So What About You?
What crazy idea do you have down deep inside that makes people
chuckle or laugh every time you bring it up?
However wild it may be, no matter how many scoff at it, risk a
little time and a few bucks. You may be able to demonstrate you
were right after all. And you'll be on your way to success.
And if it flops? No problem. Just try an even crazier idea.
Keep it up, and you'll find gold. Lots of it.