Client: Susan Kay Law

Set-up:
Susan had been writing sweet, Americana historical romances for well over a decade. Two RITAs, twelve novels, one novella, and a gazillion fans after her Golden Heart in the early nineties. Then she suddenly shifted focus, and was excited about her new directions. But her site fit her backlist, not her new books – not even a little bit.

Challenge:
Present the new Susan Kay Law and her new books – contemporary set women’s fiction with sophisticated themes – in a manner consistent with her new brand, but a big challenge would be to do it without alienating her existing audience or compromising the still-available previous product.

Strategy:
We conceptualized a subsite for the historicals that would preserve the bright visuals (cheery colors and quilt-like textures) from the outgoing site that represented Susan’s backlist so well. The problem would be making the user path into the world of Susan’s historicals seamless.

We built “historicals” right into the main navigation of the new site so that established fans could see right away that they were in the right place, and we created the new book titles their own navigation buttons to make them stand out. And then before jumping into the subsite, we created a gateway page, complete with a note from Susan and a screenshot of what the page would look like upon entering.

Once inside the subsite we made sure that the masthead was clear – you were not at the Susan Kay Law site, per se, you were at the Susan Kay Law Historicals site. To continue the connection between the subsite and the main site, we included a link on each of the historicals pages to the home page in the redesigned site’s visual style.

Post-launch, in her own words:
“The big challenge was going to be drawing in the new audience,” Susan says. “I knew that. But I was adamant not to lose my established historical romance audience base. Loyalty works both ways. And how to tackle that challenge was less clear.

“Since the new site was launched in Spring 2007 I have received a lot of emails from fans of my historical work praising my new work. I have received virtually no confused emails – no, ‘Are you the same Susan…?’ and this is testament to how well the site is working in easing the existing audience into this new writing phase.

“If I have one gift,” Susan says, “it’s knowing when to call in the experts. This shift in my writing was too much for my old site to encompass. And I’m not visual, nor could I conceptualize the thought-progress of the site visitor; I am too close for that. I’m not creative about anything but writing, but luckily my web team is.”

Susan Kay Law is the author of fourteen novels and one novella, including The Paper Marriage (modern fiction in trade paper) and A Wanted Man (the more recent RITA winner for historical romance, in mass market). Please visit her at SusanKayLaw.com where you can catch excerpts (follow title links to read right now), a regularly updating reader-based contest, and blog posts from over the years.