Here at Clockpunk Studios, many of our clients are writers, and all writers know the importance of revisions. Whether it’s your first pass back through a rough draft, incorporating the feedback from your beta readers, or handling heavy revision notes from your agent, editor, or publisher, the revision process is a key part of writing. There’s a saying in film circles that the movie happens in the editing bay, and that holds pretty true for writing, as well. The first draft is where you dump your ideas out onto the page; revisions are where you turn those ideas into a finished story, poem, or novel.
As I write this, I’m actually about the launch into the revision process for my own first novel–a licensed fantasy novel about knights, robots, monsters, and epistemological uncertainty that’s coming soon from Privateer Press and Skull Island eXpeditions–so revisions are on my mind right now.
What that led me to realize is: while we writers tend to understand how important revisions are when it comes to our stories, we don’t always place the same priority on making needed revisions to our websites. Sure, we may update our blogs whenever we can find the time, or do a periodic facelift when, say, we’ve got a new book coming out. But keeping your author website up-to-date is every bit as important as revisions to a story, and an author website that isn’t updated regularly is like a rough draft that never got polished.
Dynamic website content is important to good SEO–that’s search engine optimization; meaning that if your website is updated regularly with new and unique content, Google is more likely to send search results to your site. Keeping your website up-to-date is about more than just sticking in new blog posts or updating your bibliography with new publications, though. It’s about making sure that links continue to work, that information on your “About the Author” page is current, that editors and publishers know how to get in touch with you. Nor is it limited to what readers can immediately see when they go to your site. Keeping WordPress plug-ins updated helps keep your website running smoothly, and helps keep you secure.
Revisions take up a lot of time, and keeping your author website up-to-date can feel like a big task, especially for busy authors who’re worrying about deadlines. Fortunately, if you don’t have time to update your site–either on the front end or the back–you can rely on us here at Clockpunk Studios to do it for you! From ghost blogging services to our ongoing WordPress support, we can handle the “revisions” of your website so you don’t have to! (When it comes to the revisions on your next novel, though, you’re on your own!)