Book Websites

Penguin's marketing folks shot me an e-mail this week to let me know that they've put up a website for the hugely successful novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett. (Showing, yet again, the truism in publishing that it's much easier to sell the second million copies of a book that's already moving than it is to get something completely new to sell a hundred thousand.)

It looks very much the usual kind of thing -- pseudo-bloggy content (regularly updated, I hope) on the main page, reading guides for book groups, plenty of pictures of the author looking pretty, and lots of social networking connectivity.

Now, when I do websites for the books I work on, they tend to look like this. Or, if we're being really fancy, this. On the other hand, we don't publish a dozen novels that we paid a million-plus for (each), in the hopes that one of them will hit big and pay for all of those bets. So I suppose I shouldn't feel jealous.