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.

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.