What floats and what sinks

The question of the day is what makes a publisher’s website stand out in its methods of marketing to a target audience.  There are a lot of publisher’s websites out there; the modern age practically demands that a publisher have an online presence in order to survive.  To bring more focus to the topic I am only taking a look at publisher’s for whom I myself fall into the target audience.  I mainly looked at adult science fiction and fantasy, as these are the genre’s I most often read.  

For starters, I was surprised by the different strategies employed by the large publishing corporations and the small to medium sized presses.  All of the sites I visited utilized the format of placing a news column or blog on the front page with links to content surrounding the most recent news. Large publishing houses like TOR filled their pages with splashy graphics and constantly changing ads that plug their best sellers, while the majority of their books require you dig deeper to see.  By contrast www.orionbooks.co.uk, a smaller British publisher allows you to browse their entire catalog of titles by simply clicking one menu.  I was generally impressed with Orion’s site; it is simple, clean, and easy to navigate.  For each of the titles in their library, the cover art, professional reviews, author information, and even e-book download options are readily available and easily accessed.  Another impressive point was their company logo, which is small, tastefully designed and artistically interweaved with their pages.  The logo actually seems to fit into the page rather than seeming slapped on.  Choice of fonts and color schemes serve to bring the whole thing together in a rather aesthetically pleasing manner. 

I was very surprised when I saw the site for Bantam Spectra, one of the largest publishers in the science fiction genre.  While the site initially looks clean and well designed, there are some flaws in their system.  The site has a clean white theme, with genre listings easily enough accessed.  My problem with the site is that if you want to browse through their publications for any given genre, you must know either what you are looking for or select a month or year in which you wish to browse.  You cannot simply browse by genre.  When you do find their browse function, which is not very obviously placed, you must browse through all of the books published by Random House in a certain period (Up to two years back) and even then only bestsellers appear.  This means that they really don’t intend for you to shop around for direct buy.  I can only assume that they keep the site up as a method of delivering news to fans and expect sales to be generated through bookstores or Amazon, which is linked off the site.  While Random House is obviously big enough and powerful enough to do things this way without losing out, it still shows poor design that isn’t likely to sell a lot of back orders or new authors.