I will be creating a website as part of the on-line promotion for a book I have coming out later this month. I like the idea of being able to offer a “sneak peek” of the first few pages, but I would prefer not to have to have people download it.
Why not just post GIF images of the pages, like Amazon does? A little
click-to-next and -previous, maybe done with Carousel, and you’re all
set. Make the last pane a big fat link to Buy Now.
Walter
On Aug 3, 2010, at 2:02 PM, SkipII wrote:
I will be creating a website as part of the on-line promotion for a
book I have coming out later this month. I like the idea of being
able to offer a “sneak peek” of the first few pages, but I would
prefer not to have to have people download it.
When they click on it, does it take them to a new page on the site? Seems like I want them to view the pages in the context of the rest of the site. I thought the example I send was really good with that.
Carousel is a technique where a section of the page shifts from side to side, revealing a new segment of a larger strip of content. You can see an example here: Carousel in Freeway or here: Coda is now Nova (the original, which all others steal from).
I will be creating a website as part of the on-line promotion for a
book I have coming out later this month. I like the idea of being
able to offer a “sneak peek” of the first few pages, but I would
prefer not to have to have people download it.
For the moment you’ll need to hand roll this into your Freeway site. I
hope to roll this into an action in the future but won’t have time for
a while yet.
Regards,
Tim.
On 4 Aug 2010, at 00:27, SkipII wrote:
Okay, that is VERY cool (but you knew that!). Where do I get this?
From you?
I did a page flip with Scriptaculous a while back, and there’s a
document download for it. But you do have to do a fair bit of really
fussy hand-editing in a text window.
Download the latest Procatulous from ActionsForge and install it, make
sure you have 5.3 or later of Freeway Pro, and then get the document
here:
I have been in the same boat so I may be able to offer some insight. First of all I would say that the ability to show potential customers a limited glimpse of your book is fairly essential and you should consider doing that both with text in some form and possibly through flash video as well.
I understand your wish not to have users downloading part of the book, however, it can actually be a very useful marketing tool if you allow users to download a few pages as a PDF including a link back to your sales page. You can then deliberately make these samples available at various sites that will bring traffic to your sales page.
The scriptylightbox action in Freeway works well with html pages but not always with PDF because it depends on how individual browsers deal with PDF files. I have noticed that Safari has had some recent viewing problems with the PDF files on my site, while FireFox works well with a PDF viewer plugin but will otherwise automatically download the file. I found a neat trick in Chrome the other day make PDF files view inside the browser but I doubt if many people know about it.
Some people like to make use of Google books for this purpose of showing a sample but it is not something I have tried myself. Speaking of Google, since they index PDF files as well as html, having a couple well chosen chapter excerpts including your major keywords and search terms can help to deliver extra search traffic. It will help to bulk out the amount of text Google finds on your sales page.
I should just qualify what I wrote above about Safari having viewing problems with PDF files. It works fine if it goes straight to the URL and views them that way but it’s not working for me right now if I try to view the same file when clicking on a link where the scriptylightbox action has been applied. I don’t quite know where the bug is in this case.
It will help to bulk out the amount of text Google finds on your sales page.
A good point. Although this will NOT directly improve the ranking of
whatever page the PDF is on. Instead, it provides another document
that could turn up in search results. Which is, of course, good.
I found your post very interesting but did not see any “how.”
So, I get to ask: how?
Thanks!
Sorry Skipll, I probably just became carried away with the marketing aspects of the discussion. The reason I use the scriptylightbox action in Freeway is because it effectively keeps the viewer on the site and when done properly it looks pretty slick.
When you click on a link where the action has been applied you will see the outer area go dark in your browser to focus on your linked subject. The cool part is that when the user then closes that window it automatically comes back to your page, which is always in the background. You can read about it here http://www.freewaytalk.net/thread/view/50389
The “bulking out” I mentioned for search purposes of the text is a fairly simple concept in practice. In a case like yours where you have a book on sale you probably want to maintain a visually clean web page where the potential customer can quickly focus in one what they wish to see, however that may run contrary to the idea of having lots of visible text on your site. Unfortunately if you have little text the amount of search traffic you generate is likely to fall considerably. By adding a PDF file with a chapter excerpt that mass of text is not immediately apparent, however the search engines will still index it, which will help bring viewers to your site.
Sometime around 5/8/10 (at 07:54 -0400) Ashley said:
By adding a PDF file with a chapter excerpt that mass of text is not
immediately apparent, however the search engines will still index
it, which will help bring viewers to your site.
It is worth noting that a PDF is not a page-level part of a web site
even if it is served from there. Even if you build in links to pages
in your site it is far less likely to encourage visitors to browse
further (perhaps to the Buy page) than if they’d arrived at a regular
HTML page.
I’m not dissing your suggestion; it has merit. However, it isn’t all
roses. If SEO is important then keep in mind that you just can’t beat
the power of regular HTML text in regular HTML pages.
Sometime around 5/8/10 (at 07:54 -0400) Ashley said:
By adding a PDF file with a chapter excerpt that mass of text is not
immediately apparent, however the search engines will still index
it, which will help bring viewers to your site.
It is worth noting that a PDF is not a page-level part of a web site
even if it is served from there. Even if you build in links to pages
in your site it is far less likely to encourage visitors to browse
further (perhaps to the Buy page) than if they’d arrived at a regular
HTML page.
I’m not dissing your suggestion; it has merit. However, it isn’t all
roses. If SEO is important then keep in mind that you just can’t beat
the power of regular HTML text in regular HTML pages.
k
I would agree with all of that. There are several pros and cons with whichever route you go, depending on your objectives. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight I realise the single biggest mistake I made after writing a book was not having previously built up an audience of likely customers and not having any previous experience with marketing a product online. One year later I understand much more now, but writing the book was actually the easy part, even though that took nine months.
It goes without saying that the design and layout of the website is crucial if you want to see good sales and a high conversion rate. Last night I purchased the upgrade to Freeway Pro and I shall now have a go at redesigning my sales page. It was done previously with some assistance using the box model but I found that far from easy to deal with when changes needed to be made, so I am hoping that Freeway will now become the design tool that I always wanted it to be.