10 Things Your Website Should Have if You Are An Author
1. Your own domain name.
In this day an age, a domain costs almost nothing, and hosting, not much more. I charge $15 a year for a domain and $20 a year for hosting for my clients, and there might be cheaper (but less feature-rich) hosting available out there. Sff.net might have been cool a decade ago, but it’s not now. It just looks unprofessional. Buy a domain, and if you can, make it your full publishing name. If you can’t, don’t get too clever, by which I mean don’t pick something you’re going to hate 10 years from now. Domain names can be changed, but you should really try to avoid it, to preserve your ratings in the search engines.
2. A biography and bibliography with lots and lots of links.
If someone is coming to your website, it is likely that they want to know who you are, and what else you’ve done. Don’t be stingy here. Don’t publicize anything you’re embarrassed of, such as that mpreg slash fic that you wrote late one night while drunk, but definitely include your bibliography, and if your story is available online, for free in a webzine or for sale in some form, link to it. If you don’t, you’re missing a chance for a sale to a potential fan.
3. A News Blog with an RSS feed. Or a newsletter. Or both.
Note that I said a News Blog. Writer blogs are great entertainment, but they are notoriously cluttered with nonsense quizzes, word counts, whining, and so much other crap that finding out when an author you like has a story coming out can be harder than it should. Maintain a clean weblog that is simply for announcing your sales, appearances, and other professional items of interest. Don’t use it to post pictures of your cats. I’m an RSS feed man myself, and I think they are the future, but perhaps you should do an email mailing list as well. Post the same content to both, but make sure it’s clear that they are the same information, so your fans don’t sign up for both and get irritated for receiving duplicate information.
May 22nd, 2009 | Tags: advice, authors, web design, Writing
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