In this blog, I will share my thoughts about writing, my insights about self-publishing, and ways to promote your work.
My Website—Part 1
How I chose Wix.
When I published my first book, Railway Avenue, as a Kindle book in 2013, I had no idea that I was beginning a new career as an author. The book was more successful than I had imagined. Being a successful author, and a self-published one entails many things that I was not aware of. My first realization was that your books don't just fly off the shelves. You have to create an environment for book sales to be successful. One of the things that drive your business is a website. If you can get people to your website, you should be able to sell them books, so they say.
Earlier this year, a New York friend turned me onto a book by Joanna Penn, entitled, How To Market A Book. It exposed me to her book marketing ideas, her podcasts, and her email updates. She’s an author, entrepreneur, and podcaster who claims she has many books on the market in different genres, fiction, and non-fiction, and claims she makes a six-figure income from them. (Though, I’d like to see her tax returns.) I started listening to her podcast, and she’s a very good motivational speaker for authors. If you have the time, you should Google her and see if she has some helpful information that you can use.
I’ve known for some time now that I need an author’s website. Joanna has a video that shows you how to build a website. She said that you shouldn't pay someone to create a website for you because you will ultimately change it, and re-design it several times. I watched the video, and she used WordPress to create a website; it took her less than an hour. Yeah! She also used front-end software called ConvertKit to make the process go easier.
You’re probably wondering how can it can be that easy. Because products like WordPress have templates to create sites for different types of businesses, you merely adapt the template to your particular needs, replacing the elements in the template with your information, photos, text, etc.
However, I decided not to use WordPress. A friend suggested it was too hard to use and that Wix was a much easier application with a shorter learning curve. I had never used either one, and the fact that Joanna Penn used front-end software with WordPress, plus the cost of ConvertKit, seemed like an added expense I didn’t need. So Wix became my choice.
I will post Part 2 of my experiences using Wix in my next blog
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