Author Websites Made Easy: A Live Demo with Tertulia

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Hello everybody and thank you so much for tuning in to today's live stream. Happy Friday. Wherever you are, go ahead and drop your location in the chat there. Not your actual location, just where you're tuning in from. You can drop us a joke, you can say what's up, whatever you want to do. And you know, if you have any questions throughout this presentation as well, go ahead and put them in there and, and I'll throw them up on the screen and our guest and I can answer them to the best of our ability. But stick around to the end. We're going to be doing a great demo of this awesome software where you can put together an author website really easily. But if you don't know me, if you've never seen me on a live stream before, my name is Shane. I'm the head of digital strategy at Book Launchers. I build all of our clients websites, I run all of our clients Amazon ads, email marketing funnels, online courses. I kind of build a lot of stuff behind the scenes and also do a lot of SEO work, do website consulting with clients, all of that kind of stuff. So when I introduce my, my guest in just a second here, it's when I first met her, it really, it helped me see an easier way for authors to be able to start a website. And it's been great and we're really excited to kind of unveil this to our community and let everyone in on this. Hopefully, you know, it's not too, too much of a secret. You know, it's out there. But we want to show our community this awesome tool that we can use to get started. So, you know, being an author, just like any business, you need a central platform for your, you know, a home base where you can send all of your readers to, where you can send your audience to, to sign up to your newsletter, buy your book, book you as a speaker, et cetera, et cetera. But the problem is, you know, most authors I meet either don't have an idea on how to start a website or they've tried and they've gotten stuck. The tech is too complicated. They worked with a web developer, web designer who wasn't really a great partner or, you know, it doesn't load quickly, it doesn't look good on mobile, it's not optimized for search engines or these AI bots either. So, you know, there's a lot that goes into web design and you know, a lot of authors are end up paying a lot of extra money to fix these issues when the process just could be simpler from the start. So, really excited to introduce today's guest. When I first saw the tool that she co founded, I was just blown away by how easy it makes building author websites. There's no coding, no tech headaches, no learning curve, anything like that. It's designed for authors who want to get their platform up and running quickly and they don't have to be a web designer. So without any further ado, welcome in my guest Linda from Tertullia. Add her to the stage.

Hey Linda, great to see you.

Yeah, great to see you too.

Thanks for having us here today.

Yeah, of course. Great to have you here. So Linda is the co founder of Tertullia and if you wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about your company and about who you help and how you help them.

Absolutely, yes. I'm one of three co founders of Tertullia, which started out as a book discovery platform, an indie bookstore. We have a membership program. We are lovers of all things books. And about a year ago we started digging into the question of how we could better support authors. You know, from the start, Tertullia has all been all about how can we make a healthy publishing ecosystem, how can we bring authors and readers together to connect in powerful ways. And we realized that a lot of the tools out there for authors are fragmented. There's a lot of scams out there and we're a technology company, we have an incredible world class team of engineers and we said there's some things we can do that are really exciting here. And we've been building and experimenting. We took our first product to market in April and we officially launched Tertullia for Authors. This product that we built is a website builder for authors and it is specifically for authors. So you're not going to stand to be using our platform that is a car mechanic or a photographer or an artist, or we have built this technology just for you and it is for any kind of author. So I could get a little bit deeper into that. But the website builder at this stage, you're gonna see a demo during this. YouTube Live has thousands of people using it. So far since we launched in April, it's growing like crazy because there has been such a need and we feel authors have been so underserved in this space.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Thanks. Thanks, Linda. And that's why we have her on today, everybody. Because this is a service specifically for authors. And that's all we try and do. We help authors out, specifically non fiction authors. But like she Said this software is kind of for anybody who has, has a book or doesn't even have a book yet and they're looking to publish a book. It's a really impressive tool that we can use to really save everybody some time and make sure that you're looking great online. So before we dive into the demo though, just a quick question for you Linda. What inspired your team to create this platform specifically for authors?

Yeah, you started to get to it, Shane, in your intro we saw that authors were doing one of two things when they needed a website, if they even knew that they needed a website. Which is a big part of what we're doing is educating authors on just how important it is to get their website up early. But those authors who recognize this and set out to launch their websites, they would maybe go the route of paying a contractor or even an agency and spending a lot of money. And what we saw with these authors is their websites were often outdated, they were expensive, maybe their designer or their service provider would ghost them and they didn't even know where their site was, domain was registered. I see this all the time and we think this is an incredibly outdated approach. And on the other side of the spectrum, more and more authors were rolling up their sleeves and doing Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, etc. And the discontent on that side is that those platforms are incredibly powerful, but they're not set up just for authors. And there was a lot of frustration getting learning curve using the product, in some cases frustration because it always seemed like the fees and the add ons were going up in terms of cost. And in general authors are required to do so much entrepreneurially in their lives. And that's, you know, hitting event circuit, doing publicity, gathering, reviews, everything on top of writing. And so to be maintaining that website on top of it over time without a tool that you know, is super easy to use was a headache. So we really landed on this idea and we cannot tell you how much kind of pent up demand and sort of emotional, you know, response that we've had from people that have been frustrated. Authors have been frustrated for a long time. And I guess the last thing I'll say about it in terms of what inspired us is you mentioned that even if you're querying or you're thinking about self publishing, you haven't started yet, you don't have a book yet, you're an author to be and you should have your website up. And we, we saw that there are many people and to this day I see National Book Award you know, long list just came out. There's people on the list that don't have a website yet. There's nowhere to find their purchase links on their, you know, Instagram. So that was the other inspiration is to just make something super easy that helps authors to just get that site up as early as possible.

Yeah, totally. And for anybody watching, if you, if you already have a website or if you've tried building a website before and you've had any struggles with it, anything specific that maybe stopped you right in your tracks or caused you confusion, throw it in the chat just so we can know and kind of address it. Maybe there's something we can kind of point you to today to help you out or if you haven't started a website yet, or if you're thinking about it, you know, let us know in the chat as well because we're going to have a great resource for you afterwards. And I'm sure the demo that we're going to show you today is going to open some eyes as well into, you know, how easy this can actually be. But somebody who builds author websites on a daily basis, I can totally see the value behind Tertullia and the software that they built. And I absolutely resonate with all the issues that, that you mentioned, like what authors encounter. You know, there's, there's tech issues like, like people, they are running their own business like as, especially as a self published authorization, you know, you probably have a full time job and you're just trying to get this off the ground. So to write a book, which is a huge lift already, and then market it, promote it, post on social media, do all of these things. You know, a website is just another piece that you have to learn how to create, how to make. And then I have so many authors who will build a website and then they're like, yeah, I had it built three years ago and I haven't touched it since. So that's obviously not the best practice. That's not what we want to have. Our authors do want to have them keep everything updated. So I think what the software that we're going to show everybody today is going to give everybody a glimpse into how you can do this yourself and how you can actually have fun updating it and like make sure that you, you continue on using it. And it's a tool that you can use again and again, send, send your readers to and have a great experience every time. So without further ado, I think if you're ready for the demo, I can have you share your screen and be ready to go.

Excellent. Cool.

So I'm going to add your screen to the stage here and I will let you take it away.

Great. And I just want to say I love that you mentioned fun, Shane. It should be fun for everybody. I see. Kevin, Terry, Caitlin, Efren, all of y'. All. If you have a site already, try Tertullia. Anyway, do a free trial. There's like literally no reason not to do it. It's going to take you a few minutes. It's fun. It is so much fun to use. And I can say that because I didn't design the product interface. My amazing, talented colleague Robert did. But it's super fun and it should be that way. All right, what you're seeing is the homepage of Tertullia for authors. And you can Visit yourself@authors.tertullia.com which Shane will share with you as follow up and in the comments. And it is as simple as can be. To get started. You're going to take your ISBN, also known as your EAN or your asin if you're on Amazon only. And I'm going to choose an author today who's a nonfiction author, Mary Roach. If any of you all know her, I've never built her site before, but her book covers are gorgeous. So let's see how her site is going to turn out. So Mary Roach, this is her most recent book that I just scraped her ISBN number and then I'm going to put in her Instagram handle. Don't worry if you don't have Instagram, you can come up with a, you know, different picture later. No need. And what you're seeing is this spinning wheel which is creating the first draft of Mary's site. So we're going to put in fake email for her Mary, and we're going to claim Mary's website.

Yeah. So super easy. All she's done so far is literally just enter in the ASIN number and link up her email. And this is basically the sign in process.

Okay. And what you're going to see here is the first kind of templatized choices that you can use as the base to your website. Now there's a lot of customization options here, so don't think this is it. The fun part is yet to come. But you can kind of get a sense of what you think your style is. And no fear, you can always go back and change it later. So we're gonna let's go with this classic white and you're gonna see as you move forward with your trial, I've now entered into a trial of using the the site. This is not just a design or a prototype, this is actual working code behind the scenes. It's all been SEO, you know, optimized the way that we've built these sites out. And you're going to see how easy it is to add your blog, your events calendar, etc. Here's your home page. Let's go with the black. It's kind of classy bio on top. You could do that or you could just go with books on top kind of recommend that. Let's continue with this theme. Now what you're seeing is a kind of classic backstage area of a CMS or website builder. Over on the left hand side is a menu of all the things that you can do and there's a setup guide checklist in the middle that tells you, kind of guides you through what you should do next. You can also very easily toggle back and forth between the live website as it will look when you're finished.

And the editor just interrupt you real quick here just to kind of highlight what I think is amazing about this software is literally all she's done up until this point is enter in the ASIN number of the book, her email and picked a template and now she like you can see there's a full blown website there with all of that author's books ready to go and it looks great and now you can just go through this checklist and start on working through. So I mean just to get to this point in regular web design is so much more work just to get to this point. So sorry to interrupt, I just wanted to know.

I appreciate it Shane. So look, look what Shane's saying. You put in one ISBN for this author importing 19 books. She is prolific I have to say. So she's written 19 books, amazing award winning books in science and natural history. Now there's no copy and paste, there's no data entry. We have pulled in all the metadata for her. Look at her reviews, you can move them around. So you saw that little importing spinning wheel. Here are all the books. We're going to add a little pizzazz to her book pages. We're going to say now and paperback and then you'll see if you scroll down you can change everything is editable. You can add new reviews anytime. You can customize your purchase links. We're going to hi Amazon and we're going to make sure tuli at the top. Maybe you can want to add Spotify or your local bookshop, whatever it is. That can also be done globally for all of the sites. I mean all of the books save changes. And maybe we want to have, maybe we want to have Fuzz up here because that's an award winner. So we're going to go to Fuzz and say finalists for the national I'm making this a science award and we're going to save it. You can modify all your book pages. Then we're going to move on to author bio. I'm going to give a little tagline scientist journalist authority. And of course you can edit your bio as much as you want. Your social links, we're going to add a few and they're going to show up automatically at the bottom and the top of the screen as you would expect, as is the convention with a site Arielle on TikTok. And then we're going to go to purchase links. You can move these around, deactivate them, activate them. Contact form is fully customizable and where you put that and whether you want that on which page that is all customizable. Very, very important mailing list. We are huge believers that one of the major reasons to have a website is to get people to give you their email address and for you to own your audience. You can post on social and depending on your optimization and how popular the platform is you're on and the weather that day, people may or may not see your if you send them emails, you have a captive audience. You have a fan who has raised their hand and said they want to hear from you. And we're just really big believers that you should be doing early and often building up this list. So we default have a signup form on the site which you can customize. We have what's called a reader magnet. If you're not familiar with the reader magnet, it's the way to incentivize people to sign up for your list by giving them some exclusive content as a reward. We send out that content if you add it to your site builder. And then finally if you are on MailerLite or on Mailchimp, which are super popular among authors, you can sync your service so that any new signup goes automatically to Mailerlite on mailchimp. So that's a pretty important part of the site builder analytics. Full panel of purchase clicks, mailing list signups, etc. Super important to track your what's working and what's not working. Now, three really game changer features that we've developed over the past few Months since we launched, events could not be easier. Come to my reading, add an image, add a date, and what happens is that as soon as you add a one single event, we've created the page for you here. And the same goes with your blog. So when you're ready to start blogging could not be easier. You can embed YouTube videos, you can embed images here and post. My first blog post could add some pictures, your archives, or whatever it is that you think is important to get across, whether it's in your newsletter, news about your books, upcoming books we're going to publish. And you'll see your blog shows up and down here you have your first blog post. I didn't do any images, so it's not as pretty as it could be. And then custom pages. Maybe you've got book club discussion questions. Maybe you have an enterprise on the side that you want to promote a business. Maybe you've got, you know, lots of publications that aren't books that you want to highlight. This is a really great place to do that. And you have unlimited custom pages that will be added to your main navigation if you want. Or you can do island landing pages that live, you know, just with a standalone URL that you can copy and paste into email and social, etc. And don't necessarily link to your, to your main navigation on your homepage. Lots and lots of flexibility there. And then the fun part, and then I'll stop for a minute, take some of your questions. So we've got a beautiful template here. Shane and I have talked, you know, when we, when we first met, about some of the pitfalls of making an author website. One of the things that drives me crazy is the horror show of the homepage where people are just bolting on different features and design features and it just looks like a mess. And I think our designer has succeeded in keeping things clean and simple and pared down and easy to read, but also providing options to change this. So not only can you change your colors and your fonts, so you have full flexibility to do that. Maybe you'd really love to have some hot pink here and you want to change the whole background to royal blue. Yeah, that's sort of. That's actually kind of a classy color. Could leave that and, you know, unlimited, you know, choices here. There's a lot you can do when you get to page settings. So what I would recommend to y', all, when you try this out, set up your base site, make sure you like your author bio, all of your book information Is there correct? Maybe you customize it. Then you can have the fun of curating your site and you can add banners. You can move things around in terms of the layout. You can set different books on your homepage. Super simple, actually. Like that. That's nice. And we're going to add a banner here. We'll do something like this maybe. Well, just so you can see it, adding a homepage banner with books couldn't be easier. And you can change the color so that it pops. Or you could do something totally different with your banner. You could add a picture of you or a background image maybe. Let's see, I had taken one down. I don't. To this. See how this looks. It's a beautiful natural wallpaper here. Or maybe you want to announce. That you've won an award or that you're opening a new division of your company for consulting. Whatever it is that you really need to get across right away when you're fans and visitors first make it to the site is what you're going to have in your banners. And it could not be easier to update these, to change them at any time. So I'm going to stop for a minute and answer questions before I show you how you actually connect your site to go live.

Yeah, thanks so much, Linda. So, I mean, clearly anybody who's watching this, that is just incredible. Literally, we've been live for 23 minutes. I talked for the first five to seven minutes and now we have a full blown author website that looks amazing in just a few minutes. So really powerful tool we have here. If you haven't already, you know, go ahead and give it a try. Bookwanters.com Tertullia it's, you know, you get 14 days for free. You can just go sign up, give it a try. And even if you already have a website and to see, you know, if it's going to work better for you, this would have taken me at least, you know, an hour to put together through WordPress, like at least an hour or two just to make it look this good and have all the pieces be put together. And I build these all the time. So this is a really impressive tool. Kevin said he has a website, the design is okay, but the problem is it's written in HTML and it's a bit of a pain to update. So yeah, unless you're like a coder, it's going to be a really big, big pain to update that pretty often. But Kevin's question is he has many podcasts and I've been on and he has the video for. How can. Can he post them? And how can you do that?

Absolutely. Kevin, that's such a great question. And to your previous comment, we're really going for no code here because we really believe that the technology that we've built and the design and the interface is to the point that you shouldn't need to mess around with the code. I totally hear you on the frustration there. You can use a custom page to create, to showcase your podcasts. Of course, you could also use your blog posts. Of course, you could make a homepage image to promote your podcast. But I think for the purposes of your discussion, to show you something concrete, I would do something like this. I would make a new page, and I would call it Podcast. Then I might call it Kevin's Great Podcast, whatever the name of your podcast is. I would add my first episode. I would link to it, maybe add an image, Then add a little image here, and. Then I would add a rule under it, and I would do the next. I would do the next episode. I think that's how I would archive them. There's definitely other ways you could do it, but I think that's probably the kind of basic, super simple.

Put the link to the YouTube or Vimeo video, wherever it is, and. Or if it's not already on YouTube or Vimeo, I would recommend posting it on there because it's going to be faster. Loading times. To be hosted on a platform like that. It should be. If you were interviewed on somebody's podcast, I would imagine they have a YouTube channel that they upload all of those, too. Or if it's like a Spotify link, Apple podcast link, anything like that. You just put that in there. Then you can have a whole archive event in there. So we got one more question. The Hart's Way. She said, how would I set up a website but don't have a published book yet?

Great question. Okay, I'm going to open up a new tab here. I guess I have to unshare and then reshare. Hold on a second.

And Kevin said, okay, sounds great. But I would have to do several customer pages, as I have almost 40 podcasts. That's. That's a bunch, I would say. Yeah, I mean, you could do a couple different pages for 40 podcasts. You could organize them or, you know, prioritize the most popular ones up top. And then maybe you don't have to have all 40 on there. You can just have, you know, or one link that goes to all 40. You know, something like that. Yeah, I mean, you could put them all on there. Shouldn't slow down the website because just external links. But maybe prioritize the most popular ones up top.

Exactly.

Are you ready for me to share your screen?

Yes, thank you.

All right, so this is for questions. How do you set it up if you don't have a published book yet?

Yeah, so we definitely have quite a few authors who don't have an ISBN yet and they go here. So do you have books to promote? So in your case, to this question, to the Heart's Way, maybe you have, you know, some ideas around what your book is going to be called and what it looks like, but you're not ready to release that you would choose this option on the bottom. I want my website to focus on my bio for now. There are many people, however, who actually have the COVID and title and they're kind of panicking and they're getting closer to pub day or uploading to Spark or KDP or whatever their platform they're on. And they. They have some assets, but they don't have the span yet. So you have flexibility here on what stage, depending on what stage you're at. Let's show you. So I'll use my name. Skip this for now. And then it's the same exact onboarding. Process that you saw before where you claim your draft website.

And. Yeah, so it's the same process. You just won't have books on there. So you can still have a website in like three steps, which we just saw that you literally just sign up and create an account and then you're good to go. Exactly, yeah. The Hart's way. Not sure if you want to give it a try, but check out, check it out at this link and create your free account. It's 14 days for free. You can go give it a try and book or no book, everyone's welcome. They can go give it a try.

And then, Shane, I'd like to tell everybody what they do next. So let's say you've gone through this process of onboarding and you're in that trial that Shane described and you're ready, you're like, I love how this looks ready to go live. And I will say the majority, some just unbelievable percentage of our subscribers actually subscribed within the first two days or even often the first day that they try the product because they're so excited about it, they're having fun with it and they might not go live that same day, but they subscribe and they get ready to go live. You hit subscribe this is a normal online checkout experience, right. And you enter into a subscription with us. Now it's $7.99 a month. So price really cannot be beat. If you choose the annual plan and you pay up front, you also get a free custom domain for a year. And if you have your own domain and you want to transfer it over, we make that process super, super simple. After you've checked out, you're going to land, you get walked through, you know, guided through this process. You're going to land on a page like this and we ask you do you want to choose a new domain? My name is available. Or do you already have a domain and you want to connect? And then we recognize where your domain is hosted and walk you through the process of either pointing your domain to your Tertulia site or transferring it, depending on where your domain is registered. I just wanted to make sure that everybody saw that Shane because domains can be mystifying to people and they can be frustrating for people. We have an incredible, incredible customer support team that will roll up their sleeves and get on screen sharing with you if you don't know what to do. For instance, WIX users, they're not able to point their domains if they registered at Wix to Tertullia. It's just not something that WIX allows you to do on any platform. We walk you through that and help you transfer over on to us. So huge benefit of the service is that customer care.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you guys seem to have kind of thought of everything here and I will be singing your praises from here on out. Absolutely. But that was the last question. I don't think we have anything else. But if anybody does drop any comments in afterwards, I'll be sure to send them your way. But unless there's anything else you want to say to everybody, I'll let you go and have a couple questions just specific to us. So I can handle those. But thanks so much for hopping on. Anything else you want to say before you go?

I just want to say to all of y' all hard working authors who do wear a lot of different hats that this is the beginning and we are going to keep on building. We've already expanded this product so much since we launched in April. We're going to keep on refactoring it to make it easier and more powerful, including email add ons and marketing add ons, social media and I think you're going to be really delighted when you use it. I hope you have fun. We literally respond to every email you get, we get, including the ones to the co founders. Because we are plowing all of your feedback into this product. We literally on a daily basis are changing our roadmap to respond to what authors are telling us and learn a lot from you. So I hope you'll reach out anytime and I really hope you'll try it and look forward to hearing how that goes for you and your feedback. So thanks for your time today.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Linda. Have a great day. I appreciate you being on here and showing everybody your awesome tool. So I will let them all know where to find you.

Thank you, Shane. Bye. Have a great weekend. All.

Righty. That was Linda from Tertullia. If you're interested in trying out that tool, click this link. The bookwatchers.com forward/tertullia Julia, it's it's a really great I was blown away the first time I saw it. I think it's an amazing addition to any, any tech stack that you got going on with your author platform. But we do have a few questions. Efren asked a couple questions, so he said no, it's another question, is there any E commerce you recommend? And then he said, I'm looking to maximize quality and ROI with direct sales, but debating best printing service and e commerce interface. So for this, I mean the best service e commerce interface I think is probably Shopify. You can set up a storefront on Shopify and link it to your own fulfillment. So you can just buy a stack of books and then send those out on your own if you want to handle manual distribution. Otherwise there are automatic fulfillment services like Book Vault and Lulu Direct and Ingram Share and Sell program. So those are three options that you could use to connect to some a store like Shopify or If you have WordPress, you can set up WooCommerce on your website. I'm not sure what what platform your website's built on. Efren, just let maybe let me know in the chat if it's if it's WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, I'm not sure what's built on there, but best printing service and e commerce Best printing service probably Lulu Direct, but best e commerce store is definitely Shopify or WooCommerce. WooCommerce requires a little bit of tech know how, especially if you have WordPress, so it requires a little bit more effort on that part. But Shopify is probably one of your best bets for E commerce natural interface. So hopefully that answered your question. Terry Barnett he just said he just went live. I hope that means with or to truly. I hope that that's a, it's a tool you just use. That's awesome. Efren said. Okay, so is WordPress with SiteGround awesome? Yeah. So you can build it right on your WordPress website just using WooCommerce. That's, that's totally fine. And then maybe link it up with either Lulu Direct or with Book Vault. I think the best service you're going to get is probably from Lulu Direct, so I'd give that a try. The only thing with direct sales though, I wouldn't like expect like the main selling point behind selling your book directly from your website is not like the profits behind it. It is the fact of knowing your customer. It's not, it's, you know, having them sign up to your email list and building that community through there, sending them a customized thank you note and you know, it's welcoming, welcoming them into your community. So hopefully that helped. But if anybody has any other questions, I'll, I'll hang on and answer them. But if you, you know, if you're interested in getting your website up and going and you, you came in late, go ahead and try out the tool Tertullia. If you missed the first half of this live, it's going to be available on our YouTube channel just under book launchers TV so. Or just go to YouTube search book launchers and you can see all of our videos. They're all saved on there. You'll be able to re watch this again and, and check it out and see the demo. So awesome. Got it. Glad I could help out Efren, but if nobody has any other questions, I'll, I'll call it here and we will see you all next Friday. I'm going to do another demo of our software author launch kit. But thank you all so much for tuning in. Thank you to Linda for, for being on here with us again and we will see you all soon. Thank you again. See ya.