Note to reader: The Booknapper Author Theme is no longer available for purchase.
It seems that with each post I write in my Building an Author Website series, the road parts like Robert Frost’s two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and I keep taking the road less traveled by. But believe me, the road you choose in selecting your website’s author theme will make all the difference.
In addition to what I shared in Step Nine about the BookSnapper author theme, here’s the scoop directly from the the theme’s creators.
Marketing using the BookSnapper Author Theme
Publishing — especially self-publishing — often takes authors out of their comfort zone because it requires so much more than a natural gift for framing new worlds and imparting fresh insights with words.
On top of the challenging labor of crafting their creative works, authors must be prepared to shift gears to the much more hostile arena of promotion and marketing.
While no one can make the task of writing easier for you, marketing your literary works digitally can be simplified with the right tools.
While no one can make the task of writing easier for you as an author, marketing your literary works digitally can be simplified with the right tools.
The BookSnapper author theme is one such tool.
No solution is perfect, but you would be hard pressed to find a more practical theme for marketing your books because, unlike most other WordPress themes on the market, it has been specifically designed and built with authors and book selling in mind.
Reasons to choose the BookSnapper Author Theme
Here are some swing-factors that have swayed many authors to choose the BookSnapper WordPress theme.
BookSnapper leads with an attention grabbing banner section.
Whatever theme you settle on, you can rest assured that capturing your reader’s eye and imagination with a dominant image is priceless.
It may in fact be the only thing that convinces visitors to spend the extra seconds it takes to draw them to your opening paragraphs.
BookSnapper’s banner provides your readers with the opportunity to subscribe to your mailing-list.
A mailing list happens to be one of the most often overlooked, yet most valuable, assets an author could ever hope to build.
Garnering a list of interested readers provides you with a platform for invaluable feedback from your audience, marketing opportunities for future titles, relationship building and so much more.
When combined with the BookSnapper’s tabbed presentation of all of your social media profiles in one place (including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, Good Reads and many more), your website serves as a hub for each spoke of your roll-out marketing wheel.
The modular homepage layout includes sections for testimonials, a book-trailer video, a contact form, your other books, your author bio and more.
But as exciting as it is to have an attractive and functional website theme, there may be an even more critical component when it comes to marketing your work on the Internet: understanding how to use it.
It’s true that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Accordingly, your copy of the Book-Snapper WordPress theme comes with a very powerful but easy to use Options Panel that makes adding, removing or even rearranging the various homepage modules as easy as dragging-and-dropping the various sections where you want them to appear.
Simply select one of more than a dozen integrated color schemes (or easily use your own) upload your logo and book covers, write a few short paragraphs about yourself and your book and you’re done.
Your website will look great on everything from your desktop computer, to your mobile phone and everything in-between because it features a fully-responsive layout that configures itself to any screen size.
Perhaps most importantly, the Book-Snapper theme is deliberately focused on the task of selling.
It’s laced with strategically placed buttons always encouraging your readers to click through to your amazon profile page or directly to your vendor page where your works are on sale.
Taken together, these features provide the self-published author with a well-balanced launching pad for their literary endeavors.
Then join me in my next post (coming soon), where we create a banner/header for your new website.