Hi, my name is David Servey.

I'm the owner of DJC Graphic Designs.

We are a website design and marketing agency that specializes in helping entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Thank you, David, for appearing on the Adventures in the Heart of Children's Book Authors podcast.

It's a real pleasure to have you here.

Thank you for having me.

Today, for everyone listening, we're going to be talking about how David supports aspiring children, children's book authors, and answering the why behind why should you have a children's book website or a children's book author's website?

So there's a little bit of a difference and David and I will get into that about a website designed for your book and a website designed specifically for you as an author.

In this episode, we'll also discuss what is a digital home and how that digital home, your website belongs to you and you're not just a visitor.

What I mean by a visitor is being a visitor on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram.

You come there, you set up your page, but you have no control over that.

If Facebook or Instagram changes the way they do business, it can affect any of your followers through those platforms.

The other thing we're going to discuss is the importance of having a website.

And when we first launched our book, we didn't have a website.

So we'll definitely get into that.

They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

For a while, I guess I was throwing stones because I didn't have a website.

I didn't understand the importance of that.

But we're going to get to that and we're going to talk to about how a website can help support you as a children's book authority.

Be more effective with your distribution, your sales, your marketing, bringing your book to life.

And that's where we're looking at getting input from David.

And David also comes with a graphic design background.

And what we're hoping to do is, at the end of the day, help you, as an aspiring children's book author, learn Some of the ABCs about book authorship and the role of having a website.

I got to meet David as I met him through another children's book author, Terry Linga, episode 13, who I had interviewed on our podcast show.

And David has done all the work behind the scenes on Terry's website.

Today we're going to talk primarily about websites, but we will talk to David about a lot of authors coming to him sometimes with their edited book and illustrations.

And they're going, now what do I do?

And so we'll Talk about that.

And we'll also talk about what is a website, what's a IP address, how does HTTP, what does it mean?

And you may have heard of the front end and the back end of a website.

We're going to get asked, David, what the heck is that?

And we'll also get into the basics.

So what I'm looking to do is from David, talk about what's the absolute basic website look like that can help you get your book up and running and out into the world.

And the last thing I wanted to mention was we'll talk a little bit about lead magnets and how that could help you build an email list.

I'm sure get into this about the importance of using your website to build an email list and those are clients or customers or consumers that you get to keep because you've gathered those emails through your home, your digital home, your website.

Let's talk a little bit about you first as a website designer.

Tell us about the inspiration behind you wanting to become a website designer.

Background in a lot of different digital design.

I've done illustration, I've done graphic design.

And as our world changes, I just tried to continue to learn and to continue to build skills, skills.

And so much of our world is digital now.

So I'm like, let me learn more about websites, how to build them, how to grow them, how to maintain them, everything with best practices.

So I just keep trying to stack new skills and to keep making myself as versatile as possible.

Fantastic.

Explain to us about your website design business.

How did it evolve?

When did you really get junk like both feet?

I saw a need for small businesses to really build and grow websites.

I feel that a lot of small business owners, anything with marketing websites, design can feel very overwhelming.

And I get it.

It's a big ask.

And I think that there are opportunities to help small businesses and entrepreneurs grow and build a website at an affiliate affordable rate.

You go to a big agency and they'll get you at every step of the way and it doesn't need to be that way.

I think I view myself as a partner with anyone I work with.

Like I want to be an extension of what you're trying to do and figure out how to help you.

So I started my business a couple years ago.

I have always worked at an in house marketing agency.

So I took the skill skills that I learned there.

I'm like how can I use them to help other people?

And that was the inspiration for DJC graphic design.

It's interesting.

I want to pick up what you Talked about helping small businesses and entrepreneurs because the one thing, and it's consistent and I now incorporate it into asking the question to my guests that are self published book authors.

And I say to them, what's your business plan?

And you know what they say to me?

They say, I don't have a business plan.

I never even thought about that.

And yet you're producing a product that you would like to sell.

And so you want to get sales, you want to have distribution and you want to market your book.

And that all requires a business plan.

I'm starting to.

And as our podcast show evolves, my goal is to raise that conscious awareness that you are an entrepreneur, you have a book business, even if you have only one title and your website is an integral part of your book business.

So we're going to dive more into that with David.

But you can see from what David said, he's trying to help people with their business and that's what we're trying to share today.

If I come to you as a children's book author and I come to you and I say, you know what, David?

I've got my edited book, I've got all my illustrations and I know I need a website, but what do I do with these pieces?

Where do I start?

Is that how it comes to you?

I don't want to make assumptions, that's how children's book authors coming to you.

But maybe describe how most children's book authors come to you.

I think typically they'll be at the process where the book is published.

There's stages where maybe they're selling it on a large platform like an Amazon, but they want to feel like they have a little more ownership of how they're out there.

Because you're, if you're on a big retailer's website, you're competing with what they recommend, what they're putting out there.

Whereas if you have your own website, you are in control and you can have a lot more flexibility and a lot more fun with how you're reaching customers and what you're offering them.

For example, my work with Terry, who I've been working with, ongoing, we've been figuring out clever ways to package her book with other unique merchandise, things that can only be bought on her website.

So we have marks, we have stickers, we have activity books and it's just, it's more of a personal touch on things and it incentivizes people to order from her website because you get these little bonuses that at the end of the day don't Cost her a whole lot of money, but give so much more value to a customer.

Whereas if they're shopping like, oh, it's just a little bit more and I get this extra stuff, it feels great and you feel the connection.

I think she's using a service called Printful, is that correct?

We do use Printful to do some extra merchandise on the side, like T shirts and mugs and things like that.

And then the bookmarks and stickers I shopped out through different printers for her and then that's sold directly on her website.

And folks, we'll get in more into, I guess Printful, you'd call a third party company that still would be attached to your website.

Yeah, like a drop shipping vendor.

You don't have to buy things in large quantities.

It'll just print on demand per order.

Okay, and we'll talk more about that.

The first thing I want to get to is a couple of basic things.

And when people come to you and they want to design their as a children's book author and they say, okay, I need a website, but here's my dilemma, David.

I don't know if I should name my website after me or I should name my website after the main character in my book.

What kind of advice do you give someone when they first come to you?

I would typically advise that you name it after yourself, whether it would be John Doe, author, or something in that vein.

Because you, you don't know where your arc as an author will take you, you may not always write about that character.

It may take you in different directions.

A different character in your series may become the fan favorite.

So I would house everything under your name and then you can always set up dedicated pages as you continue to grow and continue to write more books.

Great advice and it's interesting.

And so I.

We've gone against the grain.

So it's interesting because we named our website after our main character.

And the reason being, I guess David, had I met you prior to us writing our first book, we may have gone down that path.

What ended up happening is we ended up, first of all, I've co author our books with my oldest granddaughter and now it's evolved into co authoring with all my grandchildren, which I have five.

And so we ended up writing a series of books called the Adventures of Caboose the Rocky Mountain.

So even though there is different characters introduced through the adventures, it's under the banner of the Adventures of Caboose the Rocky Mountain Bear.

Now, that being said, I just want to let everyone know last Week I interviewed a children's book author who did exactly like we did.

She created this hero character, built the whole website out for that hero character, and then realized, I don't want to build a book series.

I've got a different book in mind.

So I just want to say to people what David's talking about as a children's book authority probably makes more sense unless you are going to have a stick to it.

Iveness building a book series, you would have, I'm going to say, three to.

In our case, we've got 38 stories that we've written now.

That doesn't mean that they're all in print.

We'd love to have them all in print, but that's where we've started anyways.

I just want to give people the perspective when they start thinking about this whole aspect is that unless you're going to build a book series and you have all these different ideas in mind for different characters, I think David's advice of coming up with using your own name is probably the best advice.

And I noticed too that people do it a little differently.

Like Terry, incorporate the word books into her website name.

Did you suggest that?

She suggested that.

I liked an element like that, either including books or author into your web address because it gives you a little extra boost in your search engine optimization, or SEO, as it's referred to a lot.

And it's just a little bit of an extra tell to search engines like Google of what your website is about.

Giving clarity to your brand.

Yes.

When I'm thinking about working with a children's book author who wants a website.

So now I've come to you.

I brought some of my elements.

You and I discussed exactly what we should do.

And at the end of the day you say, okay, unless you're going to build a book series, I'd recommend you use your author's name.

And we can either put the word author in it or books or children's books, whatever it happens to be.

But now we've got the name of your website.

We know you've got this single book that you want to.

That you've got.

You said in most cases they've already produced the book, it's already being published.

Now they need a home, a digital home for their book.

What's the basics look like?

So when I first come to you, what do you say to me?

So we want to talk about what you are seeing your website doing.

And there's two paths to go down.

Whether this is just a website where you want to give people information about you and your book.

And that's just a lot of self promotion in that way.

Or if you want to take it a step further and start selling your books and other merchandise for it, which would branch the project out a different way because we're building out an E commerce portion of the site.

So depending on what you answer, we still want basic structures.

You want your homepage to talk about a little bit about who you are, what you have coming up.

Imagine that's the front page of a newspaper.

It's giving a big overview of everything going on and then we will look at other pages to build out.

Like with our work of Ed with Terry.

Like she's big on events, she's out in her community a lot, she'll do interviews.

So you give people a calendar of appearances you have coming up, a little summary of that.

You want to have a section like you mentioned earlier about collecting email addresses so you can give people maybe a newsletter about things you have coming up.

And then an about or a bio page is always great to have just to give people a little bit more information about yourself.

And that really humanizes things and it helps people feel connected to you as an author.

And I think that's really important from a marketing aspect, it's interesting.

Sting.

So you talked about a homepage.

When I first come to you as an aspiring children's book author or as a newly minted children's book author is I have my homepage and you described what else?

I guess I'm looking for what would be the basics to get me started and what do you think is so important?

I come to you and I say, you know what I what about distribution?

What about sales?

What about marketing?

Like, how do you handle that conversation?

We have to chew everything one bite at a time.

So we will build for building out your homepage, we want to introduce you to the world.

We give you some information about yourself.

Then we will build down about what you have going on next.

So we talk about, say you have your book coming out.

We give people a little bit of an information about maybe release dates or upcoming events that talk about the book.

If we are going to sell it online, we want to have a lot of call to actions of buy now or check for special offers.

If you're not selling it online, we want to tell people where they can buy it, if you are in local bookstores or local shops or if you want to send them to a larger online retailer like a Barnes and Noble or an Amazon.

So we want to Be able to give on your homepage the important information to potential customers as quickly as possible and that we determine from that initial meeting what is important to you as an author.

And then my job is to solve that problem.

David, you talked me into naming my website after myself, but I don't want to sell myself.

I want to sell my book.

Tell us how you deal with that dilemma.

So you don't want to put my face on the front homepage or if.

If you do, you probably want to have it smaller with the Hero product, your children's book being larger.

So explain to us the how the system you would use and how you would go about doing that.

I think the fun part and a lot of things, a lot of a struggle for creative people is you want your art to always speak for yourselves and you take a step back.

You don't necessarily want to be in the forefront there, but you can't untie yourself from that.

There is a lot of value of putting a face to the work.

So while you don't want to scream with your face on the front page, you want your work to show for itself.

I do advocate for value.

And for example, Terri, like, she's smiling and holding her book and I think that's great because there's a lot of pride in there and then translates over to a customer show she did something and she's proud of it.

You should be proud of all the hard work you're doing on your homepage.

Say, for example, leading with your book.

But you could have a small author photo.

I think there's a lot of value in there.

I think your about page 100%.

You should have a photo of yourself talking about yourself.

If you're.

You don't want to have too much on, too much focus on yourself as an author.

I would say homepage, maybe a little photo lead heavy with the book, but depending on your initiative going forward.

If our big push is new book release coming out, then yes, absolutely.

We want to lead with heavy images of your new book for sure.

And just to pick up on it, like you said, if you've got your website in the author's name, having a little personal touch, like a big smile, holding your pride and joy certainly makes a lot of sense.

So thanks for mentioning that because sometimes we skip over that and we forget that at the end of the day, people are wanting to connect with you as an author.

Yeah, I'll just know from a personal habit, if I'm reading a book, I will Google the author.

I'm like, what Is this guy all about, or what is this woman all about?

So there is a curiosity to people.

So there's a value in putting yourself out there.

And it's funny you should mention that, David, because my wife and I sometimes will watch a movie and there's an actor we really like.

While you're watching the movie, you're Googling, is it what's going on in that?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

That's fantastic.

So thank you for mentioning that.

I think that's something that.

As a children's book authority, remember that if you have your website in your name, personalize it a bit.

Just to.

What David's talking about is very important.

David, I'd like to talk to you a bit about the basic design, the color, why those colors, and the typeface.

Talk specifically around a children's book author's website.

I have a background in color theory and knowing what works, what doesn't work, but I want the input from the author, like you.

I want you to tell me what inspires you, what colors you enjoy, and then my job is to figure out how to make that work.

And maybe you tell me four or five colors.

I don't necessarily use them all, but I could figure out what feels like you.

It's taking the puzzle pieces you give me and figuring out how to best make it work.

And as far as fonts and typefaces, if you're going with a serif font, which is your fonts that will have the like on the.

Your hearts back there, if you have little slabs at the top and bottom that hang over, those are serifs.

Those are typically a little more formal.

If you're more of a whimsical kind of fantasy, we will find fonts that are a little more fruity form.

I want to take what you as an author feel and interpret that to you.

I'm not here to force a vision down your throat.

I want to use my expertise to solve your problem, because at the end of the day, I'm here to solve your problem.

I'm not here to say this is the only way to do it and it's my way or the highway.

I want to collaborate.

I want to make sure that you are happy because that's.

That at the end of the day is what it is.

There's a lot of elements to it.

So my job is to take it all and figure it out.

Okay, I'm going to pick up on that in a couple of minutes because I want to emphasize to everyone and the reason I talked to David about the basics.

Website basics is the beautiful thing about a website is it's always flowing.

You can always make additions and changes to your website and it doesn't have to be overwhelming and it doesn't have to be expensive.

So I want everybody to understand that you can make changes to your website.

It's not static and nor I think as a having a website, it shouldn't be static.

The person I work with, with our website, you know what, every once in a while I'll save up five or six items and like a shopping list or a grocery list and then I'll get a hold of them and say, could you make these five or six changes?

They're not huge, but they seem important to me.

So it sounds to me, David, you're just like the person that I work with.

It is important.

Don't let your website be static.

Having a list of changes you want to make, whatever that feels like.

If it's monthly, if it's every couple months, like it's great.

Like you mentioned, one of the great things about a website is it can change.

And if you get tired of a certain color scheme or look or things like that, like we can work with it and slowly evolve and it's not going to be too shocking to anybody.

It's always good to keep things fresh because if you're a customer comes to a website over and looks the same, then they're going to think you don't have anything new to say.

So having a list of things you want to update is perfect.

That's a great way to handle things.

Before we jump into getting into some of the, what I call, I don't want to call them add ons but like you called it earlier, evolution.

So talk to us about, because some of the children's book authors that I've interviewed have done out of the box.

And so what I mean by that folks is you can actually just go online and download web design services and then away you go.

You end up being the website designer and doing all the work behind the scenes in that.

Talk to us about those services and why you think that services like yourself are more beneficial to get somebody going.

There are so many services out there that they can, you can get a website up and running and out into the world very quickly.

And it's a double edged sword in that manner.

Yes, it's wonderful.

You can grab a website, throw something out there very quickly, but then you also have to ask is it done correctly?

Is it built correctly?

There's the question of do you have the time to do it yourself?

Do you have the time to maintain it?

My wife will yell at me if I'm trying to fix something around the house myself.

She goes, by the time you've gone to the store three times to get the tools you need, we probably could have hired somebody to do it properly.

I say that it's money well spent to have it done well, done properly.

I never leave you hanging when I'm working on you with a website.

Like, I'm always an email away to help you out and I can leave you in positions where your site is built and give you the keys to edit it yourself.

But I'm here if you have questions about how to maintain and change it or if you don't want to think about it at all, I am happy to just hang around and maintain it.

You wear a lot of hats as an entrepreneur and there's only so much time in the day.

Do you want to dedicate time to building and maintaining a website?

Some people do it and that's great.

I don't discourage it.

But if you want to focus on being out in the world and going to appearances and doing readings and really focus on writing, then you know, I want to be here to help you manage the website.

End of things.

Fantastic.

You know what?

We ended up being in the same boat as you.

I thought I had looked at all kinds of these different web services, but at the end of the day, I didn't even have the passion for that.

I didn't even have the interest.

So I guess that's what we're.

I would be saying to the folks listening in on the show is really know if that's the road you want to go down to because like David said, you could spend hours, days, weeks, months trying to get your website when somebody who has the expertise could probably do it in a couple of days.

So just make sure you ask yourself that question.

Is website design a skill set that I have and I really want to learn and I don't think that you'd have to probably have a.

Some sort of graphic design expertise behind you also?

Yeah, a lot of the website builder platforms, they'll give you templates and things to do, but it's still very easy to have something go wrong.

And I don't ever want to scare anyone off, but it's.

It's always a value proposition you have.

I think one thing that entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with is remembering that their time is money as well.

Your time is valuable and decisions you have to make is how is my time best used.

And if it saves you a lot of time to have somebody else build a website for you, that is.

That pays for itself.

Absolutely.

And I want to pick up on that, David, because.

Very good point.

Now that I'm starting to talk to multiple children's book authors who have self published and we start talking about, generally we talk about this off the air is we start talking about the cost of their book.

So we start talking about editing costs, we start talking about book formatting costs, we start talking about book cover front and back costs, we start talking about all those costs involved.

And they know what those costs are.

But when I say, what was the cost of your labor into developing and bringing your book to market?

They said, I didn't charge anything.

I don't know too many of us that would go to work for nothing.

Yet children's book authors constantly go to work for nothing.

And so I'm trying to encourage children book authors.

Even though I know you're doing it for passion, I know you're doing it for the love of your children or grandchildren, I know that you're doing it for the love of your community.

But at the end of the day, I still would like to encourage you to at least keep track of your hours.

And you say, how do I know what to charge for an hourly rate?

A lot of children's book authors are still working.

So I say to them, figure out what you're asking someone to pay you an hour to work for them and just use that hourly rate as at least you're going in position.

And then also figure out how many hours.

Keep track of how many hours that you're putting into your adventure.

Anyways, I digress there.

But I just want people to understand that your dream team of helping you bring your book to market still comes at a cost.

And you're paying for these services, so don't sell yourself short there.

I got that off my chest.

The one resource that we can't get more of is time.

Just know how to spend it wisely.

Absolutely.

We talked about your website.

Like you said, you're in it for the long term.

So you help someone develop their website.

You're there to help them to the next stage of the evolution of whatever that happens to be.

In the beginning, you may not start with a lot of things.

You may just start with a basic website you have links to.

To your point, that will send people to either Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other online book retailers or the.

Or you.

Or they may go to a third party like we talked about with Printful, where you've taken your graphics from your book and you've imprinted them on a coffee mug and then they buy it from a third party because they really love the graphics and they'd like a coffee mug.

I did exactly the same thing.

I have a coffee mug with our podcast logos cover.

And so when you go on to our podcast show, you'll see our cover logo.

And in this case I put it on our coffee mug.

And this was done by vistaprint.

There's so many options to do that I want to talk about now.

You've got your book up and running, you've done your launch and now and you had great initial first sales.

Now you're trying to think, oh, how do I keep people coming back to my website?

I'm going to throw some things out at you and maybe you can talk about it, David, and explain to people what it is.

A lot of times you hear this time in time out, the first thing people say about when you have a website is what's your lead magnet?

And you go, lead magnet?

What the heck is a lead magnet?

So can you give us a little idea of what a lead magnet is and how do you use that?

So a lead magnet will be what you are trying to attract customers with.

Like a lot of times you will see websites that say, hey, if you give me your email address, you can get this free like white paper that will explain a topic to you.

And obviously with a children's book author, you're not necessarily going to give this in depth report about something, but you could offer like exclusive downloads or an exclusive item for joining your newsletter or email club or whatever you want to call it.

There you could offer a discount code for joining your email list.

Like just something that incentivizes a customer to want to either shop on your website or kind of know more or keep in touch with you.

And that just so everyone knows, if you go to our website, which is cabooserockymountainbear.com the first thing that'll happen, you'll come to our homepage.

But within a matter of seconds there'll be a pop up.

And that pop up is to the lead magnet that Dave is describing.

We have these activity pages that are for a free download.

So you enter your email address and you get a set of four pages that give you access to creating your own children's book and having some fun with it.

Just to give you an example, and I think Terry does, she has some activity pages also on yeah, there's.

We've been making activity pages for her book that was.

Came out prior and her newest book that comes out later this month.

I think it's a great thing, great resource for teachers and kids.

And so just to explain too, generally a lead magnet is a digital download.

Like you're not sending somebody a physical product.

Correct?

Correct.

That would be really cost prohibitive.

I wouldn't say to do that.

There's so many options that you could send people things digitally now that it's such an easy thing to do and doesn't really cost a whole lot.

It's a great way to go.

Now talk to us about adding audio or adding video to your website.

And the reason I ask that is for a couple of reasons.

But explain to us how you as a website designer would say to a children's book author, you know what I think you should do?

You should add some audio or you should add some video.

Why would you say that?

I would say we would want to figure out what your intent with it is.

Are we.

Are you giving talks?

Are you giving interviews?

And depending on what your intent is, would say how we want to.

How we want to navigate people with it.

If you are giving your own podcast, we would develop a page that's just about podcasts and you have your audio.

Or if you do it visually, we would host your videos on there so people could easily see all of your episodes or all of your posts.

If you are thinking like you want to give an audio talk, maybe instead of writing an article, you are talking about a topic, we could have it lean and live on your website that way.

So there's a lot of options in that manner.

It depends on what your intent is with it.

But there's so many options digitally.

So any way you feel comfortable getting information out, we can make happen.

Just depends what you want to do with it.

And it isn't cost prohibitive to do, correct?

No.

We make files.

We can.

There's so many ways to get them uploaded.

There's so many ways to do it.

It's not as big of a lift as it would seem.

I want to pick up on that because I just want to expand on it with what David's talking about.

A prime example is when we first launched our book.

We were very fortunate.

We got written up in the local newspaper and so we added that to our website.

We were asked to come and speak on a couple of radio programs.

We added that to our website.

We then we realized there was value in actually adding our book reviews.

We Were getting five star book reviews and we're better to host them than on your website and have them kind of scrolling or whatever.

And then in today's world, we actually had one of our folks who bought our book, she actually left us a video review.

She's such a cute little thing and she did an awesome job.

And we thought, oh, we can't let this go.

Not at all.

Yeah.

So we added the video review onto our website.

So I'm just trying to get everyone to realize that it doesn't have to be cost prohibitive and you get to take that flattery about your product and put it right on your website.

Yeah, that's a great example.

Right, like the a video review like that.

If you have raving fans, no matter how they leave it, it's easy to incorporate reviews.

A video review is awesome.

Especially if it's a kid doing it.

Like kids and pets.

That's an instant winner on the Internet.

Absolutely.

I just want everybody understand that again is David can do that with your website and it doesn't have to be cost prohibitive.

And like I said earlier, you know what, save up a few things.

Maybe save your little basket of items that you want David to work on so that when he goes to work it isn't a three minute job.

He's.

You've given him 15 minutes or a half an hour or an hour worth of work to make improvements to your website.

I notice people talk about this is what I want to jump into this, into the store aspect of it, the third party store.

Because I know a lot of people use their website to sell directly from their website and ship, like you said, their books or stickers or bookmarks directly from their home office to the, to the reader.

But let's talk about third party.

So let's talk about Printful or Shopify.

Explain a little bit more about.

If I came to you and I said, David, you know what, I want to incorporate Printful, I want to incorporate Shopify into my website.

But how do I do that?

A vendor like Printful is integrated through a website builder called Squarespace.

Squarespace is a very excellent template based website builder.

It's a good one to use for authors that still want to have a little bit of control because it's easier to make edits and changes on your own without being too daunting.

Like my standard for websites is WordPress.

But it can be very daunting to work with and it's tough to hand the keys over to that and feel like an author or a business Owner has some understanding of it, whereas a squarespace is a little more intuitive.

So with their integration they have Printful, which is a dropshipping vendor.

They will print orders on demand.

They break down all the costs for you right away so then you can figure out what you want to sell it at to still make a comfortable margin on.

And it's a wonderful way to offer some new items to customers without feeling like you have to order boxes of shirts or mugs and figure out where to store them and hold on em.

And then.

Yeah, so you're tying no inventory, correct?

Yeah, exactly.

You don't tie up inventory, you're not tying up cash on it.

You're just, if somebody wants it, they can order it.

It gets fulfilled and it's very little risk to you.

It's.

I think it's a wonderful solution.

And then if you find a product that like, oh, I saw that people really love mugs, then maybe you can shop around to order a few cases of it at an even better rate and try and sell them differently.

But I think it is a wonderful way to dip your toes into selling merchandise.

And a platform like Shopify is great.

If you are totally into E commerce, they're a lot like WordPress where there's a lot of integrations and plugins that you could do to customize things.

It all depends on what avenue you want to go in.

But Shopify is like a industry leader for a lot of E commerce stores now.

Just so everyone understands, Printful or Shopify all have a monthly charge.

Yes, Shopify does.

So that's essentially same thing with Squarespace.

Like you'll have charges, you can get a discount if you just pay for the whole year.

But it's cost of hosting and living.

With your website, it's hosting your, that particular page of your merchandise.

Yeah, that's primarily what you're paying for.

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay.

And I think the other thing, when Terry told me about Printful and I had known about Shopify, but when I checked into Printful at the time you had to handle all the money on your end versus Shopify was a one stop shop.

So they handled everything and they just put the money in your bank account.

I'm not sure if that's changed or would you know, David, I would have.

To double check to give you 100% verify.

But I know in Terry's particular instance I have it integrated into her store.

It is two separate interfaces.

So there are ways to deposit the money and exchange the money.

I just don't know if it's 100% seamless like I know Shopify is.

I don't have that info off the top.

Right.

The only reason I mentioned that folks, is that if you don't want to have that extra step Shopify, even though their monthly rate is higher, they're a one stop shop.

In other words, handle everything.

All you basically do is collect the revenue and you don't have to worry about anything.

Again, do your research and check the different options out and whoever you decide.

To work with on your website project, ask those questions like any, anybody who's worth their salt in web design knows the platforms and can tell you the pros and cons of each.

While we're just talking about shopping and using your website to sell products, do you recommend people actually sell directly from their home to the end consumer or do you try and discourage that?

What's your philosophy?

I would say a lot has to do with how your numbers look and what you're getting.

What's your opinion on the cost for your books, what your margins look.

If you're selling it through another vendor, if you're, if you're happy with what you're making off of say an Amazon or Barnes and Noble, then don't go through the hassle of selling it under a website.

It is more work if you want to sell it yourself because you are, you're bringing inventory in.

You have to fulfill the shipping if you want to figure out different ways to make a higher profit.

If you think that you can maybe negotiate better rates for your book by selling them yourself and you can go that avenue, I would say sell them off your own website.

But the numbers have to make sense no matter what you want to do.

And now it goes back to your time as well.

Do you want to fulfill the shipping?

Do you have, do you have help?

Do you have a partner that maybe will say I'll ship all this stuff for you and make sure it works?

And it's, there's a lot of considerations and I think that's something to talk through with whoever you work with when you're building out your website.

Talk to us a bit about individual links for individual products.

So for example, a soft covered book through Amazon, how hard is that to set up a link on your website to do that?

Link to Amazon?

Yes, that's super easy to do and there's even integrations you can do so people instantly recognize that they will be jumping over to Amazon to make the purchase.

Building links and showing what they'll do is a very easy basic aspect of the website.

So we could have it, say, look like an Amazon buy button.

It could look like Barnes and Noble and jump over whatever you prefer to sell through.

We can make it look and feel like that.

So people know where they're going by.

Having that Amazon or Barnes and Noble buy button, they talk about creating a call to action and because a lot of times if you just have a link and I can be accused of that, it looks like a funny whatever, but if you actually can convert that into a call to action button, probably might drive some more sales.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

And that also gives a element of trust too.

If people see, okay, I'm going to Amazon, this link is opening up in a new tab.

Like sometimes if people just see a hyperlink URL, they're like, I don't know what that is, I don't know if I want to click on that.

But people know what buttons are.

There's just everything and they will know what they're doing on the web when they see a button.

Very interesting.

David, we've really talked about a lot of things about websites.

When I come to you as a customer, as a first time children's book author and I've got my book, is there other things that you would recommend?

Have we missed anything?

So I think our initial walkthrough, we want to know right now at the moment what you want to see on the website and that will evolve, what books you're promoting, what you want to say about yourself, maybe events you have coming up.

The next stage of a partnership is thinking about long term.

So what do we have coming up?

Do you have new books coming up and talking about, like we mentioned earlier, keeping your website fresh and change, it's not the biggest thing for children's book author, but search engine optimization is the beating heart behind a lot of websites.

If people can't find you, what's the point?

So if you keep content fresh on your website, that's a huge indicator to a search engine like Google that your website is active and alive and important.

So thinking of that and thinking ahead for authors especially is if you blog and have a blog section, maybe you're writing about topics that are passionate to you or things that you see in the industry, just content that keeps it fresh.

You don't have to be writing daily, but if you throw something out every week or every couple weeks, that just adds more to your website, that's huge.

And that goes a long way to just indicating that the website always has something new and gives people a reason to Keep coming back.

And if you have a new blog entry or something you've written about, that's perfect to send out in your newsletter and to let customers know, hey, I have something new that I'm talking about or passionate about.

It's interesting you should say that.

Thank you for mentioning that because it's really important what we've done.

And again, I'm trying to share this with people who are thinking about a website.

And what do I do with my website?

Is our website designer actually set it up so that I can go into the editor that's directly attached to the blog so I don't have to go into my whole website.

When I do my blogging, I just go put my username, my passcode, click the button.

It brings me to my blog page.

That allows me to then create blogs in draft.

And then when I feel comfortable, then I publish them.

But the nice thing about it that's at the back end and so maybe we'll talk a little bit about that is that.

So then I just produced the blog, set the, set the platforms I wanted to go out on and the time and the date, and away we go.

Just want to emphasize what David's talking about is that if you get in the habit of a weekly blog or something, it's automatically refreshing your website and you didn't really have to do much.

You're going at the back end of it.

Or I think that's.

Is that the back end?

You'd be working in the back end and then it'll push to the front end.

I don't want people to get too caught up into this because I don't want this to be a website training program.

But, but just tell us a little bit about what's the difference between the front end and the back end.

Front end, just imagine that is what your customers or your fans are seeing.

That's how it's presented to the world.

Back end, imagine you're looking at your car engine.

It's just how everything works without getting into the weeds too much.

It's just all the parts and pieces that make your website present how everyone sees it.

Fantastic.

Like I said, so you're working with someone like David can make your job easier because you can keep your website fresh from a blogging aspect without having to go and spend a lot of time saying, oh, I don't want to go into that, I don't want to touch the website or I don't want to.

People get.

Have a fear of that, setting it up to just go into Your blog and the blog editor.

It's a simple thing to do.

And you can just go in, do your draft, and then publish it, come back out, and no fuss, no muss.

It automatically shows up on your website.

Yeah.

And like you mentioned, there are ways to have it integrate so it pushes out to your social media or your newsletter.

There's so many ways to make it seamless so you don't have to think, oh, I didn't post it on Facebook or things like that.

And that's generally part of the software at the back end that's easy to use.

Exactly.

Okay.

And I just want to pick up on what Dave is talking about also, is that for us, we always.

We take our podcast interview and we actually turn it into a blog.

And so that gets posted also.

And that's a great way to do it because having all of that rich text is awesome for search engines.

So it's.

It's a nice way to double dip and get use out of.

Absolutely.

And the nice thing about it is, is, to David's point, you can also add links into your blog.

You can drive people from the blog to the podcast episode because a lot of times people are reading the blog, but they're not listening to the episode.

Or you can use your blog post.

What I do with, for a lot of my guests is I actually go to LinkedIn and I have four or five major groups that I post the podcast interview in words and put the link in.

So again, driving traffic.

And that's such a.

What you're doing is very smart and very intuitive.

Like having links and pushing people around like that helps drive your website authority.

If you are linking to other places and other websites are linking to you, that just.

It's like a rolling snowball that just keeps building your website and strengthening it and letting search engines know that this website is important and those little things matter.

Rick, I wish you would have asked me that question.

Is there anything else that you can think of that I may have missed?

In our conversation, we touched on a lot.

I think the biggest thing is don't be afraid to ask a lot of questions.

Feel comfortable with whoever you choose to work with on a website project like you, you have to feel comfortable with that person.

Like, you have to make sure that they understand what you are looking for and that they're there to solve your problem.

At the end of the day, anything I do with design, it's.

I know it's easy to think of design as making art or making things look pretty, but my job is to solve problems.

And for me that part is exciting.

I like being able to figure out a way to make a business or make an entrepreneur better.

And like, I have a lot of pride in that.

So finding a partner who gets you and understands you is key to a winning combination.

Thank you David, because that is such great advice.

You definitely need to feel comfortable with the person that you're working with for sure.

And because to David's point earlier is that generally this is a long term business relationship so you want to feel comfortable.

David, thank you for all your great insights.

Your straightforward answers have definitely taken the mystery out of a website for a children's book or children's book author and I just can't thank you enough.

Thank you for being a guest on the Adventures in the Heart of Children's Book Authors podcast.

The best way to connect with you.

David, if you check out my website djcdesigns.com it's easy to contact me and reach out through there.

Great.

And just so everyone knows, we'll provide all the links to David's website and other links that's mentioned in the show, so those will be in the show notes.

And if you found this episode valuable and others could benefit from it, please pass it along.

And if you could also give us a five star review and subscribe to our show, that would be awesome.

So appreciate that.

Thanks David.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate that.