Last month, I got some data on the essentials of a book landing page. Now I’m building a landing page for one of my earlier books, Medicine Dreams, and during the process, I had some nice realizations.
I discovered that the little Canon printer I bought new for $29 (the cheapest I could find at Walmart) can scan as well as print, so I scanned a couple of my parent’s old logging camp photos and put them on the page. It worked great, and I got lots more detail out of the old black-and-white photos The landing page is still pretty rough, but I’m pleased with what I have so far. (If you want to see a kid ready for a snowball fight, check out the snow picture. That’s me in the black hat. WordPress allows you to click on a photo to get a magnified view.)
I also had to dive into the guts of WordPress to figure out how to link the landing page to the front page of my website. Julie Gallaher, my sister-in-law, took my first clumsy attempt at building a WordPress website and spiffed it up, so she knows how to do this stuff, but it took me a good hour or more of stumbling through the menus (themes/customize/widgets/main sidebar/text) to figure out how to find the link in the database and change it. I know a little html from my former job at e.Republic, but I was still crossing my fingers when finished and went to the website to see if what I did worked. Luckily it did!
So I have a basic landing page for Medicine Dreams now, and will continue adding the other elements. I’ve always found that it’s harder to write interesting descriptions of books than it is to write the books themselves, I think, because when writing a book you are on the ground, surrounded by details, and when writing a description you hover at 5,000 feet trying to give a broad picture, and that loses some of the intensity of the book.
