I recently went shopping for blogs to submit my self-published novels to, and boy did I find some wonky looking ones. I found The Indie Review which is a list that any book blogger who reviews self-published books can ask to be added to. I added myself, and then I scrolled through the other bloggers.
There are some professional looking blog on this list, but there are also some…what’s a nice word for it…cheesy looking ones. By cheesy, I mean poorly designed, in-your-face ads, and an overall gimmicky feel. There were several blogs that I didn’t submit my novel to because they felt cheap and just…sketchy. The background and the foreground clashed, there were like eight different colors of font, too many different fonts, a title picture so big I had to scroll down an entire page to get to the site itself, and some were just hard to navigate.
Now, I am personally attracted to clean webdesign and an easy-to-use interface. I’m not saying that those other bloggers are wrong in their websites, only that I don’t like them. It makes me uneasy to send them a copy of my book; I don’t necessary want my book associated with a cheap-looking website.
By cheap, I mean in the design, and I mean unprofessional. My website is cheap – it’s free. That’s why “wordpress” is in the URL. But, I try to keep it clean and fresh looking, because it’s visually appealing.
What about you? Have you stumbled upon not-so-nice book blogs? What turned you off from them?
Beatrice B. Morgan 