I've realised a lot of images on my website are of Tyrannosaurs.
This week was half term, so we took the boys up to London to register them for their American citizenship (they now have dual British-American nationality, British from me, American from Steph). After 3 hours sitting waiting in the US Embassy, we rewarded the boys with a trip to the National History Museum, and particularly the dinosaur gallery.
Baby X is a little young for it, but he likes crowds, but Mr D had what may have been the absolute best time of his life. He loves dinosaurs and adores animals, so he tore around, identifying species and boggling at everything. We chased after, trying not to lose him in the ridiculous crowds.
Anyway, we had a good time, and half term is over tomorrow, so Mr D is back to school and Steph and I have to get back to work.
Right now I’ve cleared out all of the freelance work I’ve had, so I can dive into writing. I don’t have long to draft my new book, and I have loads of figuring out to do before I can even start, so it’s going to be a busy few weeks.
Your author website is your home, your shop window, and your little corner of your favourite café where you can hang out. It’s where you can meet your readers and really give them what they want and need from you. More than anything, it’s the one place where you have full control over how you portray yourself, how you interact with readers and potential readers, and how you can get people to actually be interested in your books and stories.
Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, whatever, these are all great. But in every one of them, you are at the mercy of someone else, some big corporation with its own interests. You don’t control the your data on these sites, nor who can access it, nor how. Their websites can change or disappear on a whim. They are ephemeral. Ask yourself: if you found yourself thrown off Facebook or Twitter tomorrow, how easy would it be to re-establish contact with all the people who followed you?
Your website, however, is yours. That means you need to get it right.
A few months ago, I redesigned this website. I have a book coming out in 2015 (Secrets of the Dragon Tomb) and my website was … well, let’s just say that if you’d burned it, jumped up and down on it, and put it through a blender, it couldn’t have been much worse. It certainly didn’t do the job.
Before I started, I spent a lot of time talking to readers and writers about what they wanted to see in an author’s website, and I spent a lot of time just surfing around, looking at author websites and figuring out what they did right and what they did wrong.
Whether you’re self-publishing your book or you’re being traditionally published, here’s what your author website needs:
Your books…
Yes, it should be obvious. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you’d be surprised at the number of author websites that don’t even list some of their more recent books. If you want people to buy your books, they have to know those books exist.
Here’s what you should have for every single book you’ve published (and for ones coming out soon):
Title
Well, duh.
Cover
Aren't you more likely to notice this cover than just the text?
Covers sell books, even if we don’t think they should. They grab attention on a page that would otherwise be dull text, and they tell readers at a glance what type of book it is.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of recognition. The more places that people see your cover, the more likely it is to spark some recognition in them. They may not know why they recognize it, but that recognition leads to interest simply by itself, and the more it’s reinforced, the more likely someone is to develop interest.
This is the same reason why a bad review is better than no review at all; someone might not remember that the review was bad, but they will remember the title or cover, or your name.
Publisher
If you’re traditionally published, give the full imprint and publisher. For Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, I list “Christy Ottaviano Books | Henry Holt | Macmillan”. If you’re self-published, use whatever you’d put as your publisher on Amazon. If that’s just your name, that’s fine. The name of the publisher makes it easier to order your book.
ISBN
Your ISBN is the unique identification number for your book. You may share a title or a name with another book or author, but no one else will share your ISBN. Make it easy for librarians and booksellers to order your book by using this. Use your ISBN-13 if you have one.
Different editions will have different ISBNs. As you’re mainly including the number to help people order your book, if you only want to list one, use the one for the edition that you want people to order.
Genre
Be explicit here. Young Adult Contemporary. Historical Fantasy. Whatever. Yeah, yeah, I know your book transcends genre. But do it anyway.
Publication Date
This is particularly important for any forthcoming books, but quite helpful for your backlist, too.
Book Description
Think of this as being similar to the jacket copy on your book. This may be the first thing that a potential reader sees about your book, so you need to hook them.
Don’t, though, just re-use the jacket copy or the Goodreads / Amazon description of your book.
Links to where you can buy or preorder the book
Don’t give a reader the chance to forget your book. If they’re interested, and they want the book, give them a chance to buy it right now.
Use a ‘buy’ button or a list of links. While it’s good to give a few options for the main stores (e.g., Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble), don’t overdo it. If you offer too many choices, the chances are your reader’s eyes will glaze over.
A buy button is a clear and obvious way to let people buy your book.
But a list of links works nicely too.
Book Extract
If people like the cover, and they like the description, then they’re going to want to see if they’re actually going to like your book. In a bookstore, they can flip your book open and read the opening. Give them the same opportunity on your website, and make it easy.
The first few chapters is an excellent sample to offer. Don’t just make it available as a PDF to download, though, because that’s a pain for readers, and they may well not bother. Make the sample a proper web page.
Testimonials
In other words, someone saying how utterly fantastic your book is.
This kind of social proof actually works. And it doesn’t particularly matter who it’s from. Just because you can’t get Stephen King or JK Rowling to blurb your book doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother. Even a quote from someone everyone knows is your best friend will work.
Reader / Discussion Guides (Optional)
Useful for school discussions and book groups.
Series Information
If you are writing a series, it is absolutely essential that you make the order of the books completely clear. It’s not always easy to tell from the books themselves (some publishers seem to delight in making it impossible to work out which book comes in what order), and it’s even harder on Amazon. Make it easy!
A Proper Homepage / Frontpage
Your homepage should not be your blog, and it should not be a ‘splash’ page.
In a high proportion of cases, your homepage is the first thing a visitor is going to see. They might know absolutely nothing about you at all.
Suppose someone knows nothing about you and they land on your homepage. Now suppose that homepage is your blog.
Look at your last few blog entries. Would you be totally, 100% happy that the first thing (and maybe the only thing) a potential reader sees about you is one of those blog entries? Does that blog entry tell the visitor who you are and what you write? Does it tell the visitor about your new book? Is it, in fact, a rant about root vegetables?
Your blog is probably not what you want to lead with.
Splash pages used to be pretty popular, but I really thought we were done with them. They never were a good idea. A splash page is a homepage that basically either has a big graphic or picture with an ‘Enter’ button or a list of links to main parts of the site.
It’s a bad idea because it’s a wasted opportunity. These new visitors who don’t know much or anything about you, you don’t have them for long. If they’re just curious, you’ve got very little time to hook them. The first thing they see should be either about you or about your book. It shouldn’t just be a pretty picture. Also, a lot of your visitors may now be using mobile devices. Are they really going to be happy if you make them download a gigantic image without getting what they’re looking for?
So, what should be on your homepage?
Your Latest Book
Including, in summary at least, most of the stuff from the ‘books’ section, above.
Emphasise your latest book on the homepage.
Forthcoming Book
With a publication date!
If you have a forthcoming book as well as a current one, include that too. Let readers know you’ve got more coming up!
Whether this or your current book gets higher emphasis will depend on how close to release date your next books is.
Julie James was emphasising her forthcoming book at the time I took this shot, because it was out shortly.
A brief biography
A brief bio for the homepage.
Not a full biography, but a brief introduction, preferably with a photo. Remember, not everyone knows who you are, and this may be the one page where you get a chance to introduce yourself before they zoom off to look at videos of amusing cats and photos of Tom Hiddleston.
Your latest blog entry (if you have a blog)
Yes, I said don’t make your front page your blog, but there’s nothing wrong with having an excerpt from your latest blog entry on your front page. Stick to about 50 words and possibly an image, and you’ll be fine. This way you give visitors a taste that they can follow up, but you don’t get in the way of the primary purpose of the front page, which is to introduce you and your book(s).
It also lets readers know that you do actually update your website. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming across an author website that hasn’t been updated for years. (Well, there is, but, you know, exaggerating for effect and all that…)
A Testimonial
As I said, ‘social proof’ is important, and you should try to get a good quote in pretty early on. That someone liked your book and is willing to say so publicly will at least give your potential readers a reason to look further.
Space for highlighting other content
From time-to-time there’s going to be something you want to promote on your website. A competition, for example, or a piece of important news. Whatever. If you have a space (or spaces) already set aside for that, you won’t have to shoehorn it in awkwardly when it does come up.
Forthcoming Event and Latest News
I’ll talk about these more later, but if you have separate Events and News sections, then including one of each (in summary) on the front page is a good idea.
Social Media Links
Social media links in the header? Lovely.
Every page on your website should have links to whatever social media platforms you use. Websites are good for presenting information, and blogs are good for keeping people in the loop and starting conversations, but if people want to interact with you more (and you want them to, right?) then social media is where you’re going to do it. Only include them if you actually use those platforms, though. For example, I have a Google+ profile, but I never, ever use Google+, so I don’t link to it. I’m not going to be interacting with anyone there.
Put the links in the header, sidebar or footer of each page. Just putting them on your ‘contact’ page probably isn’t going to do much good.
Don’t overdo it, though. Where do you want to actually want to interact with me? If you’re on a dozen different platforms, don’t list all of them. Direct me to where you want me. Three or four is good. Why not more? Too much choice can overwhelm people, at which point they’ll either click something random or not click at all.
About Me
There are probably two main reasons that people are coming to your website (discounting people who arrive randomly or by accident) and those are to find out more about you or about your books.
A brief bio is the absolute minimum, along with a photo. And, yes, you must have a photo. Unless you have a really, really good reason not to include one (which doesn’t include the argument that you don’t photograph well … been there, done that), it’s essential. People have a strong urge to see what you look like when they are making a connection to you.
A Way to Contact You
Captcha - the work of the devil.
A contact form is probably the best option, because then you don’t have to expose your email address to spammers. Don’t use a ‘captcha’. It’s just an irritation to your readers. There are far better ways of dealing with contact form spam.
If you choose to use an email address instead of a contact form, consider setting up a disposable one that you can get rid of if it attracts too much spam.
If you have an agent and / or publisher, include contact details for them too. Same goes for a publicist, if you employ one.
News and Events
If you have regular events / appearances and regular news, you should include pages listing these. If you don’t, then don’t! There’s nothing worse (again!) than a news page that has the last piece of news from a year ago, or no forthcoming events at all. You might as well nail a piece of paper to your head saying ‘This author just can’t be bothered’.
As a rough guide, if you know that you will always have at least one forthcoming event scheduled or you know that you will have a real news item once a month, then go for it. Otherwise, just make this part of your blog, but assign special ‘Events’ and ‘News’ categories so that visitors can view all of those items easily.
Reviews
If you’ve only got a dozen or fewer reviews, you should probably place them strategically around the pages of your website. If you’ve got more, make a page (or page-per-book) of them. There’s a good chance that no one will actually read them, but having them lets readers know that other people liked your book enough to say so. Social proof, again.
Share Buttons
Sharing buttons are a bit of a contradiction. They are, at once, both absolutely essential and a complete disaster. If you want to people to share your content, they’re much more likely to do it if there’s an easy button to click. However, the share buttons provided by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the rest are awful. Each one of them downloads great big files that slow down your website, sometimes to a crawl, and which use up valuable data allowances for people on mobile devices.
Your best option is to have share links for the various services coded directly into your theme or template. For example, you could include share links to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ in WordPress through this code placed in the theme files:
Now, most of you aren’t programmers, and if you aren’t having someone create a theme for you, you’ll need to either find a plugin that does this without any of the unnecessary download crud, or take the performance hit (in which case, make sure you only use the absolutely essential share buttons, because every additional one adds overhead and slows the site).
Actually, you don’t have to have a blog. A blog gives people reasons to come back to your site, rather than just visiting for specific information, but it takes a lot of effort, and it’s only worth doing if you enjoy blogging.
A Press Kit
You should include the following in your press kit:
A short biography – just a paragraph or two. Maybe 50 – 100 words
A medium biography – roughly 150 – 200 words
A long biography – roughly 500 words
A photo – at various sizes. A good guide would be small (maybe 100 – 150px wide), medium (maybe 300 – 350px), and a high-resolution photo suitable for printing (you want at least 3 inches wide at 300 px per inch, so at least 900px wide, but preferably more).
Specific info about each book
Book covers, again with at least a small and a high-resolution version
Contact information for you and your agent
Sample interview questions and answers – remember, not everyone will have time to read your book
Optionally include samples of reviews, but only if they are reviews from respected reviewers or publications
Information about any awards won, particularly if anyone will have heard of them
All of this stuff should be on your website, as web pages. But, ideally, you should also include it as a single zipped folder for downloading. Make it clear what is in the zipped folder when you do so. You may want a ‘light’ version without the high-resolution images for download as well, which may be more useful for bloggers. If you’ve no idea what zipped files and folders are, here’s a brief, simple guide from the BBC.
Appearances / School Visits Information
If you’re available for appearances or school visits (either in person or via Skype), give clear information about how you can be booked.
Next Time…
Okay, so that’s stuff that pretty much every author website needs. Next time I’ll talk about some other things that are important to bear in mind when you’re building your author website.
Feel free to leave any comments or questions below, or any suggestions for what else you think is essential for an author website.
It was an absolutely stunning day in Wales today. Beautiful, warm sunshine, a clear sky, a slight breeze to relieve the heat. I’ve become accustomed enough to the way British weather behaves with the kind of climate change we’ve been experiencing over the last decade to realise that this might be the best of the summer, even if it isn’t officially summer yet. So, me and the boys and Maya (our dog) went down to the river Usk to enjoy what might be a brief summer.
Mr D. dressed up in his explorer outfit and went looking for dinosaurs among the buttercups and long grass (we were chased by T. Rexes and raptors for most of the walk); Baby X fell asleep in his pushchair. Maya, who is getting on a bit, trudged gamely if not 100% enthusiastically behind.
Baby X understands the way to deal with summer days.
Mr D by the river Usk.
Now Mr D is playing in his paddling pool and I’m going to watch a bit of rugby.
We’re going to America at the end of July this year and staying for a bit month. So, I’ve decided my target is to write a complete novel before we go! (To be fair, this is going to be a chapter book, probably about 10,000 words, which sounds a little less impressive, so I’m going to say: I’m going to write a whole novel!)
Last Friday, we were driving back from holiday, passing through Wiltshire and Somerset (in the U.K.), and at the same time, I was just starting the latest big fat fantasy novel I’d come across. (Well, not at exactly the same time, but, you know what I mean.)
Anyway, one of the coolest things about taking that route (other than getting to pass through Bath on the way) is seeing the names of the towns and villages that you go through.
Names are important. They tell whole stories just by themselves. For example, on our drive, we passed Dead Maids and Cold Ashton. I have no idea what the story behind ‘Dead Maids’ is, but you don’t have to to immediately know there is a story there.
If we’d been a bit further south, we might have passed through Buckland St. Mary or Netherhampton. If we’d been a couple of hundred miles further north, in Yorkshire, we could have been in the fantastically named Ravenscar (the ‘scar’ being evidence of the Norse influence in the region, deriving from the word for a cliff or a steep, rocky slope) or Stainforth.
Every one of these names is suggestive of a history, a location, and a culture. Just by their names, they conjure little stories.
By contrast, the fantasy novel I started reading was full of the far-too-common fantasy nonsense names, like Blargh and K’ching (I made these up, to save the blushes of the author of the book I’m reading now). These randomly made up names do absolutely nothing for a book. They don’t give a sense of place or culture, and they certainly don’t give any history. They make a book feel thin.
Tolkien, of course, was the master of using names to lend verisimilitude to his books (look at how the names of places reflect the history and the nature of their peoples). George RR Martin does it well, too, with names of places in the North and Dorne being quite different from those in the Riverlands, and different again from those in other countries. (There is a reason Vaes Dothrak is not next to Riverrun; the names tell you about the people, their culture, and the place; they’re not random names.)
There’s not really any excuse for using random combinations of letters as names of places in fantasy novels. It’s simply the equivalent of shouting, ‘Hey! I couldn’t be bothered to do any real worldbuilding for my book!’ Which, let’s be honest, isn’t exactly a selling point.
Anyway, because we were on vacation last week, I didn’t do any work, so this coming week, I’m on super-extra focus to make some real progress in figuring out my next book.
Oh yeah. And I’ll be setting it in the real world. Where the names have already been sorted.
If you use WordPress for your website, almost every plugin you use will load extra junk into the site, slowing it down. This plugin can help you control that and speed things up again. I’ve been doing this manually, but for my next site, I’m going to try this.
Yesterday I said I was going to blog my way back into writing, because I’d been distracted by life things and then fallen into procrastination. Yeah, I do see the irony in this…
Anyway, yesterday’s target was to go through my notebook and figure out what to start working on next. Well, I managed to get a bit of time in the early afternoon, and then some more time in the early evening while Mr D was at his first ever Drama Class (which he absolutely loved).
I think I’ve pinned down a story (possibly chapter book, possibly young middle grade) to do some work on, and so that’s what I’m going to be doing more of today. Just jotting down ideas, structures, maybe trying to get started on pinning down a voice.
Sequels are what happens as an aftermath to a scene.
I realised that I’d never really thought about sequels before. I write them, but I’ve never consciously thought about them. In fact, most books on writing focus exclusively on scenes, and sometimes I’ve found myself trying to force sequels into the structure of a scene, and that’s not been good for them, because they’re not scenes.
Here’s what Butcher says is the structure of a ‘sequel’, as opposed to a scene:
Here’s the basic structure to a sequel. It’s another little worksheet you can fill out when you’re thinking about it ahead of time:
It’s an interesting blog post, and I’m not going to try to justice to it here, but take a look. It’s certainly making me more conscious of what may be a slightly neglected part of my own writing.
Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of Butcher’s stuff (his books as well as blog), and although I was initially skeptical (don’t know why; maybe I just tend to react instinctively against popular stuff, often to my disadvantage and later regret), but I’ve come to admire how well he does his stuff.
A couple more links, while we’re at it:
If you have a website, you need to make sure it works just as well on phones and tablets as it does on a desktop or laptop. Plug your web address in here to get a quick look at how your website really looks on different devices.
Yes, it’s true, for one reason or another (possibly and another), I haven’t done any ‘proper’ writing for weeks. Okay, I do have some excuses:
The entire family was horribly sick with various colds for at least the last 6 weeks
Mr D has been on his Easter holidays
We had extended family visiting
W’ve been sorting out our disaster of a house so that Steph’s parents could visit
And I’ve had a freelance project with a tight deadline.
So, yes, I’ve been copping out on the personal writing thing. And, once you do miss a few weeks, it can be hard to force yourself back into the right headspace.
Anyway, the point is that the only way I’m going to force myself back into doing this is by blogging myself into accountability.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. Every day I’m going to blog about what I’m going to do. Then I’ll have to do it, right?
Today’s work is notebook work: going through the outlines of ideas I’ve got jotted down and choosing something to develop further.
And, to stop this blog being utterly boring, here’s today’s random interesting links:
It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday here in Wales today. This doesn’t happen very often. Mr. Darcy, Baby X and I decided to take a long walk, first along the nearby canal, then up into the hills. We went up to Keeper’s Pond, in Blaenavon.
This whole area is absolutely fascinating. The Welsh valleys were big mining and industrial areas, so parts of the hills look like scenes from Mordor, with great heaps of old slag. Keeper’s Pond was actually the pond that supplied water to an enormous forge that produced hundreds of tons of iron. This is what it looked like in the nineteenth century:
Now that entire forge and the village that came along with it are completely gone.
We sat and had our sandwiches looking out over the pond to the bleak moors beyond. There was hardly any breeze but plenty of haze, and the sunlight intermittently breaking through. Mr. D. searched for predators, checking for footprints and investigating ‘scat’ (thankfully just lumps of soil…), while Baby X stared around with wide blue eyes from the safety of his buggy.
It was Mothers’ day over here in the UK, too, and the boys did a fantastic job of choosing a Mothers’ day present (a lovely heart necklace).
I have had a revelation. No more of this proper writing stuff. You know the thing. You work and work and work at being completely original, with great plots, fantastic ideas, fascinating, surprising characters, and writing that would make poets eat their own quills with jealousy.
Well, no more! Next time around, I am going high-concept. You know the kind of thing: “It’s J.K. Rowling meets James Joyce!” or “It’s Philip Roth meets Enid Blyton”. That kind of thing. No more having to come up with my own ideas. Just take two random ideas and stick ’em together.
A twelve year old farm boy is chosen to go on a quest to slay (or possibly collect) terrible beasts in all colours of the rainbow, in order to save The Land from a terrible but unspecified doom.
Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief) meets Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) – The Princess Thief
A twelve year old boy (there’s a theme here) discovers he is a princess when one of his teachers suddenly turns into a monster and attacks him with a magical tiara. He is forced to flee to princess school. Or whatever. Losing the will to live…
A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh) meets Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) – Poo(h) Games
Okay. I’m stopping now.
So. Which would you read, and what’s your high-concept idea?
So, last weekend was St. David’s Day over here in Wales. I’m not quite sure what St. David did to deserve a day, but he got one, and so did we (actually, we got three; see later). Anyway, because St. David is the patron saint of Wales, that meant that all the national historical monuments were free, so we took a trip up to Raglan Castle.
Mr. D
My brother was visiting, along with two of Mr. D and Baby X’s cousins, so, along with my mum, we made a big family trip of it. Mr. D ran into a bunch of his friends there, and spent most of the time tearing around the castle, being a dinosaur.
Astonishingly, nobody fell into a moat or off a tower or into a dungeon, but they did get impressively muddy, which kind of made me feel jealous. :)
This was Baby X’s first ever castle, and I’m not sure he noticed much of it, but it’s a tradition, because Castle Raglan was Mr. D’s first castle too.
Baby X
I love castles. Seriously. They are one of the best things about the U.K., and Wales in particular. They’re everywhere, and they’re magnificent. I want a castle. Really, any castle. My mum almost bought a house with a bit of castle wall in it, but then she didn’t. Supposedly, she would have had to maintain it, and it was crumbling. Bah, I say.
So, as I said, we’ve had three St. David’s Days this year (so far). There was the real one at the weekend, then Mr D.’s school is having an Eisteddfod for St. David’s day, and it overran to a second day. And then to add to the fun today we’re having World Book Day, and the kids have to dress up as a character from a book. Mr. D dressed up as a pirate from Jonny Duddle’s The Pirates Next Door. Mr. D has now dressed up three days in a row. (For St. David’s day, they dress up in Welsh national costume, which basically means a Welsh rugby shirt. I mean, it’s either that or dress up as a leek, right?)
Patrick Samphire developed the talent to create fire out of thin air. He likewise has mastered the ability to communicate with snakes from a distance, however he must speak words of power to do so. Patrick Samphire possesses the power to tunnel through solid titanium and he is able to run into computers. Also, he has the power to view distant locations with his mind. Sadly, Patrick Samphire becomes woefully unskilled at ventriloquism in the presence of plastic.
