‘Cause Amazon should not define your author brand!
Lulu’s Publish & Prosper podcast did a great episode on the benefits of a landing page for your book, even if you don’t have a fully fledged site. The focus here is on authors who are selling books directly, but I think a landing page could also act as a universal book page if you aren’t selling direct.
Let’s jump into it.
1. Why and when would you choose a landing page vs. a website
Landing pages are becoming more common for authors. Several years ago, creators were publishing for the first time and probably didn’t think they had more than one book in them.
The idea that you’d build an entire website just for a book was kind of silly. Maybe they already had a website, and they didn’t want to convert it into this place that’s just for their book. Landing pages really kicked off around 2021. Maybe you don’t want to build a website, but at the end of the day, building a landing page is not much different than building a website.
It’s more for people who either don’t have a website or have a website that they don’t want to really do a bunch of alterations to. A landing page is perfect because you can spin it up and tear it down just as fast as you want to. They don’t have to stay permanent. The fact that you can tailor it specifically to your book is extremely helpful.
There are a lot of things you need to share space on a website with. It’s important to understand why you would do a landing page vs. a website, or both. If this is your first book or you’re not really sure you’re going to do another book, you don’t need a whole website or to alter your existing website. You can spin up a landing page, and that acts as your sales funnel.
Whether it’s a preorder campaign for your book, a one-off book, a limited print run of a book where you’re selling a thousand copies and once that’s out the book doesn’t exist anymore, or a holiday or a crowdfunding campaign, a landing page is a great solution for that.
Landing pages are great for a solo book project, something that’s short term, not long term. You can “templatize” it. You don’t have to make adjustments to an existing website that you must have perfectly dialed in.
You can have this dedicated page. It acts as a sales funnel. You can still plug in your newsletter collection if you want, so that you’re getting email addresses for that. If you’re getting people to buy the book, you’re capturing email addresses that way, anyway. They’re great to use in conjunction with a website. It’s a great alternative if you’ve got a book or any product that you’re trying to sell.
Maybe you just want to do some really cool custom branding and you want your book landing page to be designed to look like your book aesthetic. That might be slightly different than your overall brand aesthetic.
Lastly, landing pages are really good for preorders. The idea of making updates to your existing page to accommodate preorders can be a little daunting. Having a landing page that’s just for preorders is often a really good play. Most of the tools you would use to build a landing page are pretty inexpensive and easy to use. If you don’t have a domain already that you want to use, you can purchase one pretty easily.
Consider a landing page if you are about to launch a book or product for preorders or if you want to play around with the idea of landing pages and offer something else prior to launching a book. Landing pages are that extra piece where you can keep the traffic there from getting distracted by other things and ensure that they are focusing on buying the book.
If you are driving people to your website when you are saying the URL out loud instead of sharing it in an email newsletter or in your social bio (if you are a speaker or if you’re on a podcast), you can create like a nice, short and sweet custom landing page that is probably going to stick in people’s memory better than if you have to say to people, “Go to lulu.com/podcast/book to find our book.”
That’s a step more complicated than just saying, “Go to podcastbook.com.”
If you’re doing any kind of video or audio, keep that in mind.
Remember, the landing page serves one purpose. That’s it. And it’s to whatever that CTA (call to action) is. So for, in the instance of a book, it has one purpose, and that’s to sell your book. Whereas a website is multi-purpose.
Make it as easy as possible. Remove all elements of friction for somebody finding it and then actually doing what you want them to do.
2. What to prepare before building the landing page
Landing pages are meant to be funnels. As you go down that page, you’re also going down the funnel. And ultimately what you’re trying to do is get them to a point where they’re ready to buy.
There could be secondary, tertiary goals, but the primary goal is to get them to buy the book. That’s the first goal. If you’re selling direct and using a landing page, you are probably selling direct. The whole value in doing this is because you want all the benefits from selling direct. Otherwise, you could send people to the bookstore page where your book is.
We’ve seen people create landing pages and then send them to Amazon to buy the book. Don’t do that. If you work to get traffic to your site, to your landing page, whatever it is, don’t then just redirect them to Amazon.
Use Amazon for its own internal discovery purposes. If you’re spending that money or time or doing the effort it takes to get people to come to your landing page, don’t then redirect them over to Amazon. It makes no sense.
Driving traffic to a landing page is no different than driving traffic to a website, literally. Because these pages serve a singular purpose, it allows you to really customize them to particular audiences or verticals. A website is really aimed at everybody. You’re trying to attract everybody, to a degree.
Landing pages can dig into audiences or verticals. Acquiring traffic is still going to be the same, but you get to really go a couple clicks deeper into that niche area from which you’re hoping to attract people.
Landing pages are great for running paid ads because again you can be very specific about the URL. You can get really crafty with your UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tags. It’s a really great way to take advantage of some analytical tools and things that are out there to help you really understand your spend and just how effective it might be. Where things will differ will be your skill levels and your budget.
If you’re sticking to a landing page, you’re only putting one goal onto this landing page. There’s a lot less pressure on it to be unique or memorable in any way. It’s okay to lean into a template or just have a nice sleek design that is not distracting too much. You want the branding and certain copy elements and stuff like that. But it’s okay to keep it a more simple esthetic, straightforward page as opposed to a website.
You don’t want to riddle it with a bunch of cool different functionality and features that you might do with a website or something like that. Landing pages don’t require that you have to update your website.
If you want to update your website and make that the primary place where you’re selling, have at it. It is a different level of skill and attention to detail. And in some cases it might require hiring somebody to help you, depending on how intricate your website already is or what platform it’s built on.
A landing page should be a very simplified, singular, purpose-driven page. And there’s a number of tools and other things out there that just make it super easy, almost one or two clicks and kind of done for you.
A couple of other things that you want to kind of have prepared and ready to go before you start building out that landing page include whatever visuals you want to include, whether that’s your book cover, your author photo, your specific branding, logo, anything like that.
If you had a designer design your book cover for you, maybe you could ask for some isolated elements from it. If not, maybe you have those things that you can kind of use Canva or whatever to create them now.
You don’t need the page to reinvent the wheel, but it is a nice opportunity to have some cool design branding elements that you’re not worried about.
Justin Moore built out an awesome landing page for Sponsor Magnet. His color palette and branding for the book does align with Creator Wizard, so it’s not like it’s too distinct. But his landing page for his book is very specifically branded to match. There are a lot of great examples there.
It’s not meant to be rocket science. Landing pages are meant to be quick and easy. Aside from the visuals, you’re going to want to have copy, which again, you should have all this stuff already for your other marketing efforts with your book. So your book description, USPs or value props that you would use to drive somebody to purchase your book.
Reviews, testimonials, any of those types of things. If you don’t have those, this is a good time to go and find them from people, beta readers, or others who have read your book.
While we’re saying don’t distract from the one main goal of the page, we’re not talking about creating a landing page that is literally just a picture of your book, and then a button that says, buy my book. This is still a marketing tool. You’ve gotten people to this page so they have some idea of who you are, what you do, and why they might be interested in this book.
This is your opportunity to really seal the deal with people. This is your opportunity to reiterate and reinforce what your book is about, what problem your book will help them solve, what you’re about. And why they should trust you. So this is still an opportunity for marketing trust building and authority building.
Another thing you’re going to need to make sure you have on that page is the “buy” button or what is commonly referred to as a CTA or a call to action. Don’t just throw a picture of your book up there and a button that says buy this now. There’s a whole science around CTA language. Google some of that or even ChatGPT it. Have at least one, if not multiple CTAs there.
You can repeat it because not everyone is going to need the full funnel of information. There may be people coming to that landing page who already know they want the book. Give them the button right away to buy it.
There may be some who need a little bit of convincing, so having a CTA for that first set of info is great. There may be some people that need a little more convincing, so have a second CTA after the next set of value props or information.
And then there may be some people that have to get all the way down to the bottom of that funnel before they click that button. So you should have another one down there. You don’t have to just have one at the bottom of the page or funnel. People are coming to that page in different stages of readiness to purchase.
Having those CTAs scattered throughout the page is the best way to do that strategically, not just randomly. Just having one, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice.
The most important thing of all is the domain. It helps if you have a really cool domain.
3. Tools and platforms to help build your landing page
A lot of tools are very hands on and manual. If you’re good with that kind of stuff, great. You can use something like Unbounce or some of these other platforms that are specifically for creating landing pages.
You can create landing pages through certain email providers. The more popular route these days are actual platforms that are popping for the specific purpose of giving people space to sell, whether it’s books or something else. It’s a landing page service where you’re just going to put in some information, give it some instructions, and the page gets built for you and there are templates there.
One of our favorite newer ones is platform called Books.by. That’s what they’re geared toward: books. It’s marketed to authors and it’s an easier, stripped down way to create your own Shopify storefront for authors, with print-on-demand plugged in and everything already. It really makes things easy for you if you want to say, here’s my stuff. Pick a really cool page; everything’s done and ready to go.
It’s a really great plug and play option. Books.by has a very straightforward, step-by-step walk through building out your landing page for you. It is designed with authors and self-published authors in mind. It is designed to highlight books and help you build out a landing page specifically to help you sell more books.
It also integrates with Lulu. If you want it to be Lulu books that are getting printed and shipped, no problem. It’s perfect not only for first time authors or book writers, but authors who have multiple titles.
Another one that we have come across more recently is a platform called Stck (“stack”). This was built for creators by creators. They’re not just author-focused.
They work with a lot of different creators: musicians, authors, artists, animators. But it’s the same premise. It’s having a place to sell your books, your content, on a platform that’s going to take care of a lot of that heavy lifting for you with a landing page-like presence for the sales of your content.
Like Books.by and some of the others, they have different ways of integrating with print-on-demand providers and different ways of collecting the money from your transactions and the customer data. If you’re running subscription-type content or a podcast that’s behind a paywall, stuff like that. Stck so far is off to a really good start.
Relatively new, but we’re seeing good things from them. It is good for people who also publish things serially or regularly. Great for serialized content and for multimedia content. So if you’re tying together a newsletter and a podcast or blog and videos, it’s not just books that they’re supporting. It’s all different types of content creation.
Some ESPs (email service providers) also offer landing page builders or an experience where you can sell products through through there. Kit, I believe has an ecommerce function. Kit, formerly ConvertKit, is primarily an email provider platform subscription service, but they do have an ecommerce functionality now.
Carrd is more of a landing page builder than an email provider. There’s a lot of different services out there that facilitate landing pages.
Do your own homework and your own research. If you already have a solution, look into whether or not they have some kind of landing page building tool. Like if you are using Kit as your email service provider and you didn’t realize that they have a tool built in already, or the functionality built in already, that you can build a landing page for products within there, now you know.
If you’re somewhat tech savvy or into learning new things, you can use something like Zapier. The ability to connect two sites, two platforms, whether it’s a print-on-demand provider and your website or whatever that might be, that’s always a good option as well.
There’s another tool that’s similar, Make.com. It’s another tool that you can use to bridge platforms together.
Gone are the days where domains used to trade hands at $100, $200, $300,000 apiece. It’s rare because there’s just so many different variations now.
It is a lot more widely accepted these days to not have a .com, whereas back in the day, if you didn’t have a .com, you just weren’t trusted, period. Now you can have a dot com or you can have a .ink, .by. There are other domain types. And so yeah, I mean, keep that in mind when you’re setting yours up.
You can also just go with the tried and true: building a page on WooCommerce, Wix, or Shopify storefront and just design a single page if you’ve already claimed your domain space but you just haven’t gotten around to building the website yet.
Or for right now, you’re just going to keep it just one simple page. You can still just build a single landing page using any of the main hosting platforms and sites.
Maybe you’ve got a WordPress thing started already and you want to potentially use WooCommerce to build that in. You can do that for sure. It can take a little more time. There’s a learning curve there if you don’t already know how to do it. It is a lot of drag and drop, so it’s kind of easy to that degree. But there’s just so much more customization available.
There are more things you have to consider when you’re setting up the ecommerce piece yourself and not relying on somebody else to have already taken care of that.
But by all means, you know, if that’s the path then get a jumpstart on it. Build out a one page storefront or landing page for that book, and then later you can expand that into being your full-on website or home base.
We’ll always be in favor of people building a full-blown website or a Shopify store or something like that.
I had this conversation at Momentum recently. I asked some of the experts in the room if you know that you have long-term goals like starting a single channel content channel now, but you know you want to expand it, how soon is too soon to start thinking about securing an email newsletter setup and a website? And they said it’s never too soon.
Even if you don’t launch them now, if you know you’re going to build a website a year down the line, there’s no reason to not secure that now and at least have something there, if that something is a single buy button for your book until you manage to build out the rest of it.
The sooner you secure those things, the better. They’re getting snapped up at a pretty record pace right now, but. And there’s a lot of AI fakes and scamming going on where they’re also buying up URLs and domains to use, and social media handles and all those things.
So even if you have narrowed it down to three names or brand names you’re going to use, go secure those. They’re not expensive. And if you don’t end up using them later, you can not renew them and get rid of them.
4. Tips to optimize your landing page
We’ve had several people recently make the claim that SEO is dead.
SEO is not dead at all. What a lot of people would agree with is even if SEO is dying, if you look at the future of how people are searching and finding information, AI is still a fraction of what people are doing with search on Google.
The ways that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of these tools that we’re using serve up results to you is not completely different from how you would optimize a piece of content or a website for traditional Google search and for Google to index you and find those things. The principles of that still apply if you’re trying to get ChatGPT to pick up your content.
Regardless of where you fall on that and that particular debate, the point stands that optimizing your landing page, both in the colloquial term of it and in the technical term of it, is a good idea.
A landing page that has one goal in mind. Keep it simple. Do not distract from that. Keep it straightforward. I don’t care how much copy you are or are not putting on the page. I don’t care how many CTAs, distinct blocks of the same CTA, cause again, remember just one, but multiple times repeated throughout the page. I don’t care how many times you’re doing that.
Keep it clear, simple, direct, what the focus of the page is. Do not distract your potential shoppers. Do not send them somewhere else. Do not give them a reason to leave.
Sometimes people will get a little tempted just in case the visitor decides they don’t want the book, to also offer other things. That entire page should be dedicated to the book or whatever product it is you’re trying to sell, but we’re talking about books. Don’t distract them.
Don’t get distracted yourself and think, I need to offer these other things. If they want other things from you, they’ll find them. That page needs to be dedicated to the book.
That goes with one of our next points about using visual storytelling. This is a great opportunity for you to push people through the funnel, quite literally, where you’re telling a story as they’re scrolling down the page. And there’s a lot of great ways to do that. We’ve seen a lot of really cool ways people use graphics to do that. People will use fun charts or flow charts.
But if you are going to use visual storytelling that includes video content, something behind the scenes or social proof, you have to embed that content in the landing page. Don’t provide a link to watch a YouTube video or say to go to an Instagram and see a Reel. You’re sending people away.
You’re distracting from your point. Visual storytelling is a great thing to do with the landing page. But simplify. Keep them on the page.
Testimonials, social proof, reviews, independent reviews—build trust. Tell them what’s the story behind this? Why should they buy this? And that goes in hand with just being intentional with what you say with your copy. So, try not to generalize too much. Be very specific. People get hung up on SEO or generative AI—just write what you feel is specific to the book that you want them to buy.
Don’t worry about who’s indexing what. If you write true and sincere copy that reflects that book and the value that it brings to a reader, you’re going to be fine. Don’t get hung up on whether this going to be good for Google or ChatGPT or Claude. Don’t worry about any of that. Just write really good, intentional, simplified copy.
Don’t try to lie to people about what your product is. Don’t try to be so clever and cute that they’re not clear on what it is that you’re selling them, or why they should be interested in it. This is your opportunity to be intentional. Because it’s going to help you optimize your landing page, and also because it’s going to help you build trust with the people that are on that page.
Offer incentives. This is optional because some people are good at that and some are bad at it. Not a lot of people know how to structure a well-positioned incentive. You typically end up giving away your margin on the product, and especially if this is just a single book thing, if you’re not, there’s nothing really to go along with it; you’re just offering a book.
You don’t have a whole lot of wiggle room there. Incentives can be good. They don’t always have to be a percentage discount based incentive; it can be something completely different. Maybe buying the book directly from you will also get the reader a free downloadable PDF checklist.
Make sure you’ve done these things. There are things you can offer as an incentive for them to buy the book directly from you on your landing page. It doesn’t always have to be get 10% off. In fact, I would probably discourage people from doing that.
Do it for certain things or align it with something, like if there’s an event coming up that you’re speaking at, you give 10% off because of Momentum 2025. And special bonus, if you’re going to Momentum, bring your book up to me. Not only will I sign it, but I’ll give you a free PDF checklist.
Those kinds of incentives are pretty cool, but it does take a little bit of thought ahead of time before you’re building the landing page to have that incentive in place that’s going to make sense.
You have the opportunity on your landing page to say, “I know you could go buy this somewhere else, but if you buy it from me, you’re supporting a small business owner, a creator…that’s really beneficial to me.”
The main goal of selling direct is that you want access to your customer data. The whole reason that you would want to be doing this is so that you can collect your customer data and continue to build a relationship with them. So, do not forget to ask them for their email address.
That’s just something you should put at the bottom of every page you build: an email capture. Whether it’s your website, five different landing pages, it doesn’t matter. It’s standard practice. Put an email capture box at the bottom of every page you build. Even a landing page that has one purpose.
Don’t distract, don’t give them other things to do, other things to buy, other things to download, you just want them to buy your book. Still, put an email capture at the very bottom of the page just in case they don’t purchase right away.
They may sign up for the newsletter and see how things go with that. If you do get them to buy, then you’re going to get the email address. So, sticking to your primary goal is not a bad thing. But for consistency’s sake, always have an email capture box at the bottom of the page.
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