I'd like to hear some opinions on whether an author who is promoting his first novel, should create a web site for himself, or the book. I'm leaning toward the book because that's what I want to promote and that's what I want people to search for. Of course, there would be information about me on the site. Your thoughts?
Thanks, jeff
Yourself. Here's why:
When my co-author and I wrote our first book, it was historical fiction and we also wanted people to find "the book." But what we discovered was that people who are searching FOR the book don't think intuitively. If they see a good review (and we had several in major national newspapers/magazines), they generally do a search for the AUTHOR to see if there are other books they'd like as well.
By starting out our website under the book's title (which wasn't a terribly unusual title), we were forced to re-make the site less than six months after the book's release because it became obvious that people weren't finding us. Once we changed to our names, hits on the site increased exponentially.
Now, that said--if your book title is SO unique that there's no possible way a searcher could happen upon a different site first, then go for it. But before you make the decision, go do a search yourself for the book. Use a variety of engines, from Google, to AltaVista, MSN, and Yahoo, plus some of the meta crawlers (search engines that specifically search OTHER search engines.) Some Metacrawlers are: metasearch.com, metacrawler.com, dogpile.com, and mama.com.
If you don't find a single thing with that title, then you might have good luck with a site under that name. Otherwise, I'd stick with your name.
JMHO, of course.
