So Publishers: if you’re going to have a publisher website, what the heck should it do for you? It isn’t enough to simply have one. When I made my publisher site for my fake book in my real marketing class http://baristapb.yolasite.com/, it was to create a brand around the book, its author, and its publisher. Branding is easy for a single book—you can go for humor and personality.
However, for an entire publishing house, the website needs to be created with their potential—or at least target—audiences in mind. One publisher that does a particularly swell job is W.W. Norton and Company http://books.wwnorton.com/books/index.aspx. The website has a clean look with clear navigation for their audiences. Their website targets an academic audience by providing textbooks and literary fiction with corresponding course materials.
Educators can copy study questions straight into their lesson plan. Giving away free information offsets a book’s price and increases net worth. My mother taught high school English when I was a child, so I know that writing lesson plans and grading papers takes up a lot of a teacher’s weekend. Any device that adds even one free hour to a Saturday may tip the scale in favor of buying a classroom set of W.W. Norton’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyall Mueenuddin.
One audience that was absent from W.W. Norton’s website was that of the potential author wishing to submit a query letter or manuscript. That doesn’t mean that the information isn’t there, but if it is then it wasn’t meant to be found easily. The publisher probably doesn’t want blind submissions and instead only wishes to work with literary agents.
The publisher Random House http://www.randomhouse.com/, however, does explicitly state that they will only work with agents. Potential authors may not be a target audience, but they are drawn to Random House’s website. Random House (snarkily) suggests several agents an author might contact:
“If you would like to have your work or manuscript considered for publication by a major book publisher, we recommend that you work with an established literary agent. Each agency has manuscript submission guidelines. You may wish to refer to The Literary MarketPlace (the LMP), a reference guide that contains a listing of literary agencies. It can be found in most libraries.”
Random House has strengths and weaknesses in its random philosophy. It can diversify project choices, not commit to any one genre, and can take on projects that are experimental. Fine. Good for them. They are big enough not to need a market niche. Although, if a niche audience is defined as a small group of like-minded people, then Random House must have a random audience, a large group of people with different interests. That makes it hard to target their website to any specific audience.
Their website is hard to navigate because it the shear volume of things on it. It pulled here and there, and I clicked links I hadn’t intended in hopes of finding the information I sought. Sometimes I found what I was looking for, sometimes I didn’t. The audience for Random House is hard to determine. Good thing they have imprints.
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