Marketing Materials - A Marketing Website, Button Three

29 September 2011, Marketing Materials - A Marketing Website, Button Three

Introduction: I realized that I need to introduce this blog a little.  I wrote the novel Aksinya: Enchantment and the Daemon.  The working title was Daemon, and this was my 21st novel.  Over the last year, I gave you the entire novel in installments that included commentary on the writing.  In the commentary, in addition to other general information on writing, I explained, how the novel was constructed, the metaphors and symbols in it, the writing techniques and tricks I used, and the way I built the scenes.  You can look back through this blog and read the entire novel.

I'm using this novel as an example of how I produce, market, and eventually (we hope) get a novel published.  I'll keep you informed along the way.  At this moment, I'm showing you the marketing material I put together for a novel.

Today's Blog:  When your novel is published, you will want to add two other buttons to your marketing page--three and four.  Button three is the cover button.  This may sound overly simplistic, but when you are published, reviewers, newspapers, other websites, people will want a picture of your cover.  Your publisher will usually send you a high quality jpg or other file of your cover.  Just save this cover picture to your website documents and link it to a button.  I label the button "Cover."  This makes it easy for a visitor to find.  Additionally, you will not usually want to use this picture for your websites--it will be too large to load quickly.  You want your websites to load quickly or visitors won't wait for it to come up. 

You need to make about four different sizes of your cover.  Size one is the super large, very detailed picture you scan or your publisher sends you.  Size two is large.  When I say large, I mean about 300K bites and no larger.  The next is medium at about 75K bites, and the last is small at about 35K bites.  You can make these files by using various graphics editors.  I like using the old Microsoft Picture editor that came once with office. 

Large files will load slowly and small files will load quickly.  In general, a 35K bite file will load very quickly and not make your readers wait.  You will want to use the medium size file for the larger images of your cover.  Don't use the large or very large image files directly on your websites--otherwise it will take minutes for your page to load.

I'll repeat my published novel websites so you can see more examples:   http://www.ldalford.com/, and the individual novel websites:  http://www.aegyptnovel.com/, http://www.centurionnovel.com/, http://www.thesecondmission.com/, http://www.theendofhonor.com/, http://www.thefoxshonor.com/, and http://www.aseasonofhonor.com/. 

I'll write about button four link tomorrow.