In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Savvy Book Marketer Dana Lynn Smith discusses why it’s important to keep yourself available to your readers, and how to do it without compromising your privacy.

Author  websites and blogs are an essential book promotion tool. But far too  many websites lack contact information for the author or make the  contact information hard to find. This seems to be especially true of  author websites that are on the Blogger platform.

What  if someone wants to ask a question about you or your book, interview  you, request a review copy, invite you to guest post on their blog, tell  you how much they enjoyed reading your book, or suggest a joint  venture? How will they find you?

While  it’s important to make it easy for people to contact you, it’s a good  idea to protect your email address from spammers who harvest email  addresses online. One option is to use a contact form on your website.  There are various plug-ins that work with WordPress.org sites, or you  can use a service such as EmailMeForm.

Another option is to use an encrypted email link. I use the Enkoder form  from Hivelogic. If you click the “email me” icon below my photo in the  right column, a blank email addressed to me should automatically pop up.  Encrypted email links are not entirely foolproof, but they work well.

However,  I have found that there are a few email programs that are not  compatible with the Enkoder, so I have also added an image just below it  that contains my email address. Because this is a JPG image, rather  than text, it should not be visible to bots that are harvesting email  addresses.

Some  people try to disguise their email address by inserting various  characters such as myname*at*website.com. According to my research, many  bots are sophisticated enough to see through that tactic. Probably the  worst thing you can do is to place an actual link to your email address  on your site. That would be highly visible to bots that are searching  for email addresses to sell to spammers.

Take a look at your website now and see how easy it is for people to find you and whether your email address is secure.

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This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.