What does an author website need? Your input.

It's an unfortunate truth that a lot (maybe most) writers' websites tend to be rather awful. Not necessarily in their appearance (although many do look bad), but in the way they function and what they contain.

This isn't a surprise and it's not the fault of the writers, because getting a professional website can be a really expensive option, far beyond what most writers can justify paying. That leaves writers with three real options:

1. Build it yourself
   Which is great if you're a web designer. Which most writers, of course, are not. If you're not a pro and you build the site for yourself anyway, it may be okay, but it won't be working for you in the way you might want.
2. Pay someone cheap to do it for you
   Cheap is generally not great. Seriously. Even with the best intentions, someone who is only charging you a few hundred dollars just isn't going to be able to put in the time to make the website as good as you need it to be, not unless they intend to go out of business or starve within the year. 
3. Use an existing template or theme
   If you sign up with wordpress.com, you can choose a professionally-designed template (theme), change certain elements, and create your website there. For free. You can even have your own web address showing on it. You can do a similar thing on blogspot (although the result won't be as good). But your choices will be limited, and none are set up with the needs of writers in mind. They are generic, and they mostly designed to be blogs, with a few pages attached.

None of these are at all satisfactory, in my opinion. They're not going to get you readers or promote you.

As a writer, having an effective way to present your books, build an audience, and sell what you've written is absolutely essential.

So, I've decided to start a project. I'm going to build a WordPress template / theme that is designed specifically for writers to use. Something simple, that can be 'branded' to match the needs of the individual writer. I'm going to make it free to use, modify, hack apart and reassemble, or (almost) whatever else you might want to do with it.

Before I do, though, I want to be sure I'm including everything important.

A while back, I wrote a post called '10 Things Every Author's Website Should Include'. But I want to know what you think.

If you're an author, what do you want in a website?

If you're a reader, what do you expect or want to find on your favourite writer's website?

I'm going to try to include all the important things I can. So, what would you want to see?

By the way, if you want to keep on the progress of this project and find out when it's released, I'll post updates here or you can follow me on twitter.

Friday Links

So, I could write a new blog post, or I could just SHARE THE TOTAL AWESOME that other people have written or created.

Oh, okay, you've convinced me. Let's do the latter.

Writing and books

Author Event Tips: THE READING (of dooooom!) - Jennifer Laughran

Tips on how to handle your author reading without coming off as a complete fool.

JK Rowling: 'The worst that can happen is that everyone says, That's shockingly bad'
A few weeks old, this one, but still a really interesting interview with JK Rowling about writing, her life, and her new book.

BristolCon
The one day science fiction and fantasy convention is on Saturday week (October 20th). Steph and I will both be there.

The (literary) heroes who saved me - Booktrust blog
Stephanie Burgis writes a powerful and personal guest blog entry on how heroes in books helped her through a very difficult period in her life.

Tools

Cropp.me

If you ever upload images to your website or blog, it's a good idea to crop them to size first. You can do this on your computer, using something like a photoshop or whatever photo utility you use, but cropp.me makes it way easier to do it in the browser, while you're doing your blog post. It's free.

Gumroad

Need to sell books, ebooks, or pretty much anything else through your website but don't want to go to the effort and expense of setting up your own shop? Gumroad will allow you do to this. They charge a small commission, and handle the payments, gathering of delivery address, and hosting of ebooks. I've bought through them, and it worked well.

Payhip

Only need to sell ebooks and don't want to pay any commission? Payhip lets you upload and sell ebooks and they don't take a penny of your money. You still have to pay whatever charges PayPal makes when they transfer your money, but that's all. They seem to intend to make money by offering premium, charged services, but the ebook side (they say) will always be free. This is a new service. I've not used it, so I can't vouch for it.

Science

The Drugs Don't Work: a modern medical scandal - Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre explains how pharmaceutical companies distort medical trials and hide results they don't like. It's pretty scandalous, and worrying if you rely on medication.

Space science stamps

If you're in the UK, you'll be able to send letters to space. Actually, no you won't. But these space-themed stamps are gorgeous and very cool.

Web and Design

The Venn Diagram of Design

So true! If you want any design work done (book/web/whatever) this let's you know your options. (Humor!)

My eyes, my eyes!

Someone pointed me (via Twitter) to this blog post:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/whats-the-point-of-publishers-in-a-digital-age/

It is quite possible this is an interesting, fascinating article. I wouldn't know. I haven't read it. The text is absolutely tiny. Miniature. Unreadable.

Seriously, I do not want to have to squint at the screen to try and figure out what it says.

There are a lot of websites like this around, ones where the text is so small that's it's just not worth the bother of trying to read them. Most of these websites were designed in an unfortunate period in web design just before iPhones and laptops with high-density screens became popular, and when there was a fashion for tiny text.

Back then most people were still using low-resolution monitors, and the text was just about readable. Not anymore. Now, though, on most screens, this text is horrible.

Okay, I know I can zoom. I do that with some sites. But they are sites I already know and am interested in. A new link that I come across on Twitter? No. One look, and I'm out of there.

Do yourself a favour, and make sure your text is readable. Otherwise people aren't going to stick around to read whatever great wisdom you're so desperate to share.

/end of rant. Thank you.

Social media buttons on your blog or website

You're probably familiar with social media buttons on websites. You know the kind of things: 'Share this on Twitter / Facebook / some network you've never heard of'.

These buttons seem to be everywhere these days. Every news item. Every blog post. Every web page. Shouting at you to (please) share! Share! Share!

Recently, there's been a lot of debate in the web design community about these social media buttons and whether they are really a good thing.

Here's one enormous problem with these social media buttons: they slow down your website.

Every social media button you have downloads a bunch of crap from Twitter or Facebook or that-network-you've-never-heard-of. Your website has to contact Twitter / Facebook / etc. and download a file.

The combined effect of this can be to add two or three seconds to how long it takes your website to display, and this is at best irritating to users, and at worst, if your visitors have a slow web connection, it might make them give up altogether.

Add this to an experiment carried out by the large website Smashing Magazine. They removed their twitter button, and found that this actually increased the number of times their articles were shared on twitter.

And, because these buttons are so widespread, most of us have become accustomed to ignoring them, in much the same way that our eyes skate past banner ads.

On the other hand, I don't know about you, but I do sometimes find myself clicking on those share buttons. But I only really do it on a few, limited websites. I do it on the BBC news site, sometimes, and on one or two campaign websites (you know the kind of sites; the ones that allow you to sign a petition or send an email to some politician). Otherwise, I tend to just copy the web address and tweet it if I want to share something.

If you do have social media buttons on your website or blog, think carefully if you should remove them. If your content is very shareable (and you'll know that, because people will be sharing it a lot), then keep them, or at least a couple of them. 

If not, get rid of them, speed up your website, and maybe even find that you get more or at least better-quality shares.

Because if someone has actually bothered to copy the web address and post it on Twitter or Facebook, that may mean they really think their readers will be interested. And one good share is worth a dozen pointless ones.

Web Design from Scratch: Secondary Characters

Yesterday, I started a new blog series on planning, designing, and building your website. I asked you to think of your website as a novel or short story, and I started outlining how you could use the model of a story like this to plan your website.

I suggested that you put yourself, as the website owner, in the position of the protagonist in the story, and I came up with personal character motivations as the protagonist in the story I was planning.

Today, I'm moving on to the supporting cast of characters.

Secondary Character Motivations

The supporting cast in this story are the visitors to the website. They are the people I'm trying to interact with through my website, and I'm only going to reach my character goals through my interactions with them.

Here's the thing: much as in any good story, the secondary characters really don't much care what the motivation of the protagonist is, except inasmuch as it impacts on their own lives. My visitors don't care if I meet my goals. They have their own goals.

As George R.R. Martin put it, every character is the hero of their own story. Your visitors are following their own stories as they visit your website, and you need to know those stories if you want to be part of them.

There are three important questions to ask about every supporting character in a scene:

1. Where are they coming from?
2. What are they intending to get out of the interaction they have with the protagonist? (Hint: it's almost never the same as what the protagonist — you — wants out of it.)
3. Where are they going to?

If you don't know those things, your supporting cast will be cardboard cut-outs; if you don't know these things for your website, those visitors won't be hanging about for long.

Okay, so I'm hoping my visitors will be:

1. People who love reading fantasy short stories (particularly, but not exclusively, contemporary fantasy stories)
2. Editors, publishers and other professionals in the field of middle grade fiction (particularly those with an interest in fantasy and steampunk middle grade fiction)
3. In the future, middle grade readers, librarians, parents and so on.

You'll have your own potential visitors, and you should try to get as good an idea of them as possible. Once you know who they are, ask yourself the three questions above. It can be good to brainstorm these with someone else if you can.

Let's look at the first of my groups and try to understand them.

Fantasy Short Story Readers

1. Where are they coming from?
You can interpret this question in two ways: Physically, where are they coming from? And, what is their background?

(Jenny Crusie recently had an interesting blog entry where she asked herself the same question about the characters in the novel she's currently writing. Check it out if you want more inspiration to answer this question.)

"Physically", these readers are likely to come to my website because they've either:

1. read one of my stories somewhere else (in a magazine, an online publication, or, conceivably having read one of my ebooks), 
2. they've come across me elsewhere and I've seemed interesting (...), 
3. they've read a review of one of my stories, 
4. because someone has linked to me, or 
5. because they've come across me in another context entirely and saw that I write fantasy short stories.

In terms of their background, this group of people already like fantasy. They probably know the genre reasonably well. Short stories are, generally, a smaller and more specialized part of the genre than novels; they're harder to come across and discover than fantasy novels.

Because my short stories range from YA to much older fiction, I don't think my readers are restricted in age, although I suspect most are adults, and probably in their thirties and forties. From what I can tell, both men and women read my stories.

Because of who these people are, I'm not going to have to sell the idea of fantasy, or the idea of these type of stories, to the readers. I'm having to sell them on the idea that my stories are interesting and exciting enough to read.

2. What are they intending to get out of the interaction?
Clearly, people come to your website for a reason. They have to click on a link to get there. They have something in mind. Even if they are randomly surfing out of boredom, they want something as a result of visiting your website. So, what do these readers want? I think there are three reasons that this group of people would visit my website.

1. To read one or more of my short stories.
2. To find out if any of my short stories seem interesting enough to actually read.
3. To find out something about me (for whatever reason). We could drill down further on this to try to work out what they might want to know about me.

If I don't satisfy these desires of my subsidiary characters, they're not going to stay in the story I'm creating here. They'll decide it's not their story, and they'll head off elsewhere, never to return.

3. Where are they going?

This one is a bit more tricky.

What we're essentially asking, in the context of a story, is 'Where were they heading to after this interaction, and how have they been changed by the experience?'

This is the nature of interactions in stories; they cause changes of direction for someone (probably for everyone, although I'm only focusing on the secondary characters, right here).

We can ask the same questions for visitors to the website. Where were they heading next? For the most part, visitors will either be intending to go to another website (often to one of their usual haunts, like blogs or twitter or facebook, or, if they came looking for something to read, to another author website) or they are intending to go offline.

I want to interrupt this progress to another destination, or, if I can't interrupt it, then I want to create the desire in my visitors to come back. I want visitors to read my stories, so I want my stories to be a step on the visitor's path. They may still be going to their eventual destination, but I want them changed by the journey, in such a way that they'll read and enjoy my stories.

Likewise, if they came to read one of my stories in particular, I want them to go on to read others, and maybe even buy my ebooks. I want them to remember me as a writer for that possible future when I have a book or more stories to share.

Let's take a real life example for this particular question. A couple of years ago, my wife, Stephanie Burgis, visited Nalini Singh's website. She was only intending to visit quickly to find out when Singh's next book was out. But while she was there, she noticed that there were 'extras' available: free short stories, deleted scenes, behind the scenes stuff. She stuck around to read them.

As Singh keeps adding more, Steph goes back to read them. And, as a result, she's bought several novellas set in Singh's worlds. She became involved in the worlds, and Singh changed her as a result of the interaction.

This is what we're going to be aiming for in building the new website: A change in the subsidiary character (the visitor), so that their arc includes doing whatever it is we want them to do, while still satisfying the desires they had when they visited.

If you can answer these three questions for each of your groups of visitors:

1. Where are they coming from?
2. What are they intending to get out of the interaction they have with the protagonist?
3. Where are they going to?

Then you will know what you need your website to do.

The next stage will be figuring out exactly how to do it, and that's what we'll be looking at next time on the blog (although sadly not this week...).

(Unless people particularly want me to, I won't blog the answers to the above questions for my other two groups of visitors, but the principle is the same.)

Note
There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can look at your characters in a story. For example, by asking, What do they want? What are they doing to get it? What is standing in their way? And where do they end up? But I like the approach above because it allows me to focus on the interaction of the characters (visitors) with the protagonist (me) through the medium of the website. Use whichever works for you.

As always, feel free to leave comments, questions, or requests for anything you'd particularly like covered in this series.

If you want to follow along with this series but you're not interested in the rest of the blog, you'll be able to see all the entries under the web design from scratch tag.

Web Design from Scratch

If you've been following me for a while, you'll no doubt have seen me blog about how I really need a new website. I do a variation on that blog entry about every six months, and then nothing much happens.

The thing is, being a web (and ebook) designer, whenever I'm designing, it's always for someone else. I never get around to building a new website for myself.

This time, however, I've come up with an idea to force myself to do it and to make up for the fact that I'm rubbish about blogging regularly here. As an added bonus, the whole thing is designed to give you, yes, you, dedicated and neglected reader, the chance to find out how to build your own website from scratch.

This is the idea:

I am going to blog the process of planning, designing and building a whole new author website from scratch right here. I'm going to try to do it in such a way that if you're thinking of building a website (or getting someone else to build one for you, or even if you're just planning to get a simple pre-built template for your website) you can follow along and see what you need to do and how you can do it.

And, what's more, I'm going to approach the whole thing from a novel (!) angle.

I've blogged about building websites before, but that was quite a few years ago, and as Stephen King would say, the world has moved on, and I'm a far better web designer than I was back then. I also have Ideas.

Now, building myself this new website is going to take place in the few free moments I have between my paid design work, my writing and my looking after my son, so this is going to take quite a while to get through, but stick with it and we'll get there eventually, and if you've walked with me all the way, you should have a shiny new website at the end of it.

(If you're following this blog because you're interested in ebook design and formatting, don't worry, I'm not neglecting you. I'm planning a whole series of blog posts on how to convert and format your novel as an ebook. Hang around. We'll get there...)

So, let's get started on websites.

Character Motivation

Okay, huh, what? I'm supposed to be talking about websites, not characters, right?

As it happens, I've spent the morning writing my incredibly awesome, ground-breaking, block-busting (ahem) novel, so I'm in writer mode.

Conveniently, writer mode is actually a very good mode to be in when you're planning a website. I'm going to treat this whole website as a novel, rather than a website, and I think you should do that too.

Isn't that just a gimmick?

No. I don't think so. You see, some terrible lethargy and lack of imagination seems to come over people when putting together their websites. They might be the best writer in the world, full to the brim of exciting, mind-blowing, sparkling ideas, but when they start making their website? They design and write with all the imagination of an underpaid temp being forced to sell a bargain brand of carpet cleaner. It seems like a chore. (I've been that temp; believe me, you're not going to feel inspired.)

I want us to attack our new websites with the same energy and understanding that we do when we write a new novel or short story. (Or, if you're not a writer yourself, then with the same enthusiasm you do when you crack open a new novel by your favourite author.)

I don't want us treating it as an oh-my-God-I-don't-know-how-to-do-a-website. Because you do. Know, that is. You just didn't realise it.

The protagonist

In this particular story we're creating, I'm playing the protagonist (yes, I do write most of my stories in first person, since you ask...), and I know enough to realize that you don't launch into a writing a story without knowing the motivation of your protagonist.

Planning and building a website is a big job. It's an investment in time and/or money. It can be a tough challenge. There are going to be obstacles and reversals and possibly some big tragedies. As the protagonist, you need the motivation to start it and get through to the end.

First up, let's look at where I am as a writer. (Your own position will be different, and it will influence where you're going with this if you're playing along, but the principles are the same.)

I've been writing short stories for, well, a long time now. My first stories were published in 2002, and I've had another fifteen or so published since, along with a bunch of reprints. About five years ago, maybe, I turned most of my efforts to writing novels. Although my incredibly awesome agent is currently sending my most recent novel around, I don't have a book deal. A month or two ago, I put a bunch of my previously published short stories up on Amazon as ebooks.

So, from my point of view, I want my website to:

1. Promote my short story ebooks that are on Amazon
2. Let visitors find out about and read my other short stories that aren't on Amazon
3. Present me as an exciting author to potential publishers
4. Be able to be easily repurposed to promote my books if I'm lucky enough to get a book deal

Right now, my website is painfully inadequate to meet any of those requirements. My primary motivation in this whole process is to be able to reach those goals, and to do it better than any other author websites out there. (Reach for the stars, etc, etc...)

The current (and very old) website: not up to the job. At all.

My secondary motivation is entirely selfish and not really related to my writing: as a web designer, I want and need to be pushing myself by learning new techniques and technologies. I can't always experiment with client websites, but I can with my own. I'm planning to learn a few new things in this process. More on that later.

Okay, my protagonist has his motivation. But the protagonist isn't the only person in a story with a motivation. In fact, in this particular process, the protagonist's motivation is arguably not the most important one.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about the other characters in our story, and what you need to know about them.

Feel free to leave comments, questions, your own character motivations (if you're planning to do this yourself as I go along), or requests for anything you'd particularly like covered in this series.

By the way...

I've called this series 'Web Design from Scatch', but I'll be covering a lot more than simply web design. I'll be looking at all the planning, structuring, writing, designing, building and deploying of the website.

If you want to follow along with this series but you're not interested in the rest of the blog, you'll be able to see all the entries under the web design from scratch tag.

See you tomorrow!

Coming up next week on the blog...

Starting next week, I'll be posting a series of blog entries about planning and building your author website (although if you're not an author, you'll still be able to follow through the series and get something out of it). The series will be spread out over several months, and I'll cover absolutely every aspect of making a website, from the first concept through to the completed site.

I'm going to actually plan and build a website as I go along with this series, and you're going to be getting it 'live'. I'll be doing the work as I blog about it, so you'll get to see the process in its full glory, or you'll get to see a complete disaster. Probably a bit of both. It's like reality TV. But with less TV, and more reality.

If you're thinking of getting an author website, this is the series for you!

First up, I'll introduce you to a novel method (yes, there's a pun there; yes, you'll have to wait until next week to find out what it is (and, yes, I am now trailing puns...)) for figuring out exactly what you should have on your website and how you should create and present it. By the end of this stage, you'll be putting together the actual content for your website, all before you even have a sniff of the design.

Watch this blog if you want to follow along.

Also...

Further into the future, I'm going to be running a series of blog posts on how to convert your manuscript into an ebook and format it. Stay tuned for that too. And shout at me (virtually) if I'm taking too long to getting around to that one.

Flora's Fury

It could sound like an exaggeration, but in this case it isn't: I have been looking forward to this book for years.

Now, this isn't a book review. I haven't got my copy yet, but I can't wait until I do.

You see, back in 2007 I think it was I was at Wiscon, the science fiction and fantasy convention, and everyone seemed to be talking about this astonishing book, Flora Segunda. Being a tad contrary and far more grumpy than my age justifies, I humphed and didn't take much notice, proving not for the first time that I am my own worst enemy.

 Anyway, not so long after, my wife, Stephanie Burgis, pressed a copy of Flora Segunda into my hands, and I actually read it, and I realized that everyone had been right. It really was an astonishing book.

Here's the goodreads description of Flora Segunda:

Flora knows better than to take shortcuts in her family home, Crackpot Hall--the house has eleven thousand rooms, and ever since her mother banished the magickal butler, those rooms move around at random. But Flora is late for school, so she takes the unpredictable elevator anyway. Huge mistake. Lost in her own house, she stumbles upon the long-banished butler--and into a mind-blowing muddle of intrigue and betrayal that changes her world forever.

Full of wildly clever plot twists, this extraordinary first novel establishes Ysabeau Wilce as a compelling new voice in teen fantasy.

But it really doesn't do justice to the fantastic, alternate-world version of California that Wilce created, nor the incredible adventures that engulf Flora.

The second book, Flora's Dare, came out in 2008, and it was just as good. And then ...

Well, publishing has its own reality, and it's not for the likes of you or me to explain or even understand them, and for some reason, the publisher then sat on the final book in the trilogy. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, the final Flora book was released. Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Importance of Packing Light is now out.

You can find out more about the book, and the other two books in the series, at Ysabeau's website, www.yswilce.com.

I will declare an interest here (other than the fact that I am an enormous fan of Ysabeau's work). A few days ago, Ysabeau contacted me because she needed her old website updating. Unfortunately, the website is old and cranky, and we've decided that it really needs an overhaul from scratch. So, I've put up a new, temporary homepage with links to where you can buy the book and where you can find out more about Ysabeau and her books.

Hopefully, over the next few days we'll have more stuff up there (including, with permission of her publisher, the opening of the novel). But, in the meantime, here's a screengrab of the temporary front page I've put up.

Enough of that. Now go and buy this awesome book! You won't regret it.

10 Things Every Author’s Website Should Include

1. Who You Are

Okay, this might seem obvious. But most people who arrive at your website won’t know much about who you are or what you do. Some of them will have followed a link, others will have come via a search engine. They might not even know you’re a writer. And they might arrive at any random page on your website.

Your name and what you write on the top of every page (www.stephanieburgis.com)

Make it very clear on the top of every page who you are and what you write. Your name and either a tagline or a (very) brief intro are ideal.

2. What You’re Selling

Most authors don’t like selling. We think we’re being pushy and that we’re going to come off as arrogant. But our visitors want to know what we’re selling. They want to know about our books or stories. They’re not going to appreciate having to dig into the depths of our websites to discover them.

Let your visitors see what you’ve written and let them see what it’s about. If they’re not interested, they’ll move on, and they won’t be offended.

Highlight what you're selling (www.liahabel.com)

If you’ve got another book coming out soon, make sure you promote that too.

Highlight your next book too (www.juliejames.com)

3. An Excerpt

Not everyone goes to bookstores anymore, and not every bookstore will carry your book. If you’ve followed step 2, you’ve already got your cover and a brief description on the front page of your website, and on a page specifically about your book. Now you need to give your potential reader the chance to decide if they are actually going to like it.

Almost every publisher is happy to let you post a portion of your novel on your website (and your contract probably explicitly lets you do this). Try to post the first three chapters, but certainly put up the first chapter. Make sure you check with your publisher first, though.

Let your visitors read excerpts (www.nkjemisin.com)

Make sure the chapters are real web pages, not just PDFs or ebooks to download. It’s okay to have downloadable versions too, but most readers will want to get a taste straight away, just as they would flick through a book in the store.

4. Calls-to-Action

Eventually, you are going to want your visitors to do something, other than just leave your website. It might be as simple as giving them the chance to leave a comment or tweet a link to the book. Or it might be to buy your book. To throw in a bit of jargon, you want to offer them a ‘call-to-action’.

A ‘call to action’ can just be a link, but it’s better if you can make it really prominent so that it pops out of the page.

Clear calls-to-action (products.sitepoint.com)

Every page on your website should have some kind of call-to-action, so that your visitors don’t hit a dead end at the end of the page, and every major section of a page would benefit from one too.

5. Your Next Book

Once someone has read your book and loved it, they may visit your website to find out when your next book is due, particularly if you are writing a series. Tell them! If you don’t know the exact date, or even if you don’t yet have a cover or title, make sure you let them know there’s another book coming and roughly when.

Readers want to know what you're publishing next (www.stephenking.com)

6. A Complete, Up-to-Date List of Your Books

Number six in any list is where the author shares a vague, personal anecdote (I just made that up), so here goes. Some years ago, I was a big fan of a certain author. I read every one of his books I could find. But then no new books appeared. I checked the bookstores and the libraries, but nothing.

I looked on his website. Zilch. I was disappointed, but not surprised; these books were quirky, and they certainly weren’t bestsellers. I figured the publisher had dropped the author.

Fast-forward a few years, and I’m looking through Amazon, and I suddenly think to check up this author. I find out that not only is there a new book by this author, but the author has been publishing steadily, through a small press. I checked his website again, but still no mention of these books.

In fact, you’d probably be surprised at how many author websites are like this. It’s crazy. I would have been buying this author’s books all these years if he had listed them on his website.

Now, websites can be time-consuming. That’s why you need to be realistic when you’re building or commissioning your website about how much time you can put into it. If you commit yourself to a blog, and a news section, and videos and a vast selection of extras and you don’t have time to do it, your website will quickly become out of date.

But! At the very least, you need a page that lists your works and which is always up-to-date. If you mention publication dates and books in several places, make sure you keep a list of the locations, so that you can update everything at once. And schedule a complete review of your site a couple of times a year where you read through every page and fix what needs fixing.

7. An ‘About Me’ page

Unless you have a very good reason for needing privacy, you should always have an ‘about me’ page on your website, with a photo. If readers love a book, they want to feel like they have a connection with the author. They want to know about the author.

About the author (www.writingandsnacks.com)

Remember, though, that you need to tailor your biography to your audience. If you’re writing funny books for eight-year-olds, don’t go on about your jobs and degrees. Author Barry Eisler has an excellent article on writing your biography.

8. Cross-Linking

If you’ve got a large website, particularly if you’ve got a blog, you should make sure you cross-link to your books or stories. For example, a visitor may well have arrived at your website to read a blog post.

Your blog posts will, of course, be enough to make them interested in you and your work. So make it easy for them. Feature books and stories on every page, and cross-link from each book or story to another one. Give your readers the chance to discover all your work.

Cross-linking so readers can easily find your books (www.tobiasbuckell.com)

9. Clear, Easy-to-Read Text

If there’s one thing that writers’ website fall down on more than anything else, it is the typesetting on the page. The chances are, your website is going to have quite a bit of text on it, particularly if you’re posting extracts from your novels. That text needs to be easy to read.

This means, in almost all cases, you should have a white (or nearly white) background with dark (not pure black) text. Dark backgrounds or backgrounds with significant amounts of texture make reading text much more difficult.

There should be a reasonable amount of space between lines (for web techies among you, that usually means a line-height of 1.5 - 1.6 em), and you should use a clear, simple font (nothing too elaborate).

If your website was built more than two or three years ago, the chances are that your text is too small. Back then, most people were still using fairly low-resolution screens that sat on their desks.

But screens are changing fast. They are becoming much higher resolution, and tablets (e.g., iPads) and smart phones are becoming far more common. This means that the text on many websites is now painfully small. Sadly, even some newer websites are still being built with tiny text. Make sure yours isn’t one of them. (Again for web techies, a font-size of at least 13 or 14px is the minimum you should be aiming for with most fonts.)

Clear, easy-to-read text is absolutely essential (www.jennreese.com)

10. Contact Info

At some point, people are going to need to contact you, maybe to chat, maybe for business, maybe just to tell you how great you are. Ideally, you should have a contact form on your website, rather than an email address.

Make it easy to contact you, your agent or your publisher (www.stephanieburgis.com)

If you do have a contact form, don’t include a ‘captcha’ (one of those annoying things where you have to figure out a horribly distorted word and type it in a box). Don’t make people jump through frustrating hoops just to contact you. If you have to deal with a bit of spam, that’s a price worth paying, and there are other ways to stop spammers. (Ask your web developer how...)

If for some reason you don’t want to allow visitors to contact you, make sure you include contact details for your agent or publisher.

And a Bonus...

If you want to keep your readers simmering nicely until your next book is out, think about an ‘extras’ or bonus material section on your website. Extra chapters, background material, additional short stories, ‘making of’, games, newsletters, competitions, seasonal specials, and whatever else you can think of. You might also consider making this a members section with exclusive content, to reward people who sign up to be contacted by you. Eloisa James does this as well as any author I’ve come across.

Extras keep your fans excited between books (www.eloisajames.com)

The End, at Last...

What do you look for when you visit an author's website? What particularly good (or bad!) sites have you visited recently?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this!

Five Reasons Every Author Should Have a Website

A week or so ago, author Anne R. Allen posted:

That’s why a website you have to pay somebody to update for you isn’t as useful. People want to connect with you—not your web designer. The difference between a website and a blog is the difference between putting an ad in the Yellow Pages or personally giving somebody your phone number. Blogs are friendly. And if you have a blog, you don’t need an expensive website. Here’s what Nathan Bransford said about formal websites:

“The thing about author websites is pretty simple, in my mind. They're expensive. Are they worth the return on investment? I don't know. I can't think of a time I've ever bought a book based on a visit to an author's website. But I have definitely bought books based on author blogs. I know I may not be the average reader, but I still have a hard time seeing how it's worth the investment unless the website is really spectacular.”

So, naturally, I don't agree.

Let's skip over the "That’s why a website you have to pay somebody to update for you isn’t as useful". Of course, this would be true, but there is no reason why you should pay anyone to update your website for you. Modern systems make it as easy to update a website as post a blog entry.

Here are 5 reasons why authors should have websites:

1. Full control
   Blogger is great. It really is. You can customize your blog design enormously, add pages, change the background, and so on. But there are limits. If you use Blogger (and even more so if you're using wordpress.com or LiveJournal), you'll still only be able to do a limited set of things with your website. What if you want to promote your brand new book, as author Lia Habel does on her website, liahabel.com:
   
   
   
   
   
   For that, you need a real website. You need the flexibility to highlight different things in different parts of the website and different parts of pages: books, events, competitions, news, and so forth.
   
   Same goes for the design. A blogging system like Blogger is flexible, but only to a degree. A full website can contain or be pretty much anything.
2. Full Information About Your Books
   At some point, you're going to have more than one book out. You'll have a back-catalog, forthcoming books, maybe a bunch of different editions. Your readers and potential readers need an easy, quick way to find out about these, because once they're read one, you want them to read more.
   
   You'll want info about the books, you'll want extracts, you'll want reviews, you'll want easy links to buy, you might want bonus material. Doing all that on a blog and keeping it easy to find would be nearly impossible.
   
   Add to that info for the media, the events and so on, and no one is going to find it all on a blog.
3. Not Everyone Likes Blogs
   Shocking, I know. I like blogs. You probably like blogs. But not everyone does. If all you have is a blog, many potential readers aren't going to spend the time trawling through your daily thoughts. They want the bare information about you and your books.
4. A Website Doesn't Have to Be Expensive
   You will always get the best result by hiring a professional designer who really knows what works and how people use websites, and who can give you a website that will meet your aims, whatever they are.
   
   But not everyone has that kind of budget, and you have to balance the cost against the returns. Luckily, that's not the only way to get a decent website. You can buy high-quality templates (either as a WordPress theme or as plain HTML/CSS website) from places like themeforest.net for around $35.
   
   In addition to this, you'll need to pay for web hosting (a few dollars a month) and a domain name (web address - about $10 a year). That's it. A professional quality website for a very reasonable cost.
5. A Website is Low Maintenance
   If you want a successful blog, you need to post regularly. How regularly is up to you, but all the successful blogs I read have something new at least once a week. If you're working full-time and have a family, you may only have a lunch break to do your writing. Do you really want to sacrifice that for blogging?
   
   By contrast, you only need to update a website when there is something key to add, like a new book. You can have a great website that you only update twice a year, or one that you add stuff to every day.

Of course, a website and a blog don't have to be either/or. If you add an 'about me' page to your blogger and a page listing your books, you already have a website. And many people who run their own website integrate a blog into it.

Your blog is your chance to talk on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis to an interested community of people, many of whom may never actually read one of your novels. Your website can be a more static collection of information about you and your writing specifically for readers or potential readers of your books.