Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

4. A pro­fes­sional design

This isn’t cheap, but if you are a pro­fes­sional author, you owe it to your­self to hire a designer who can build you some­thing nice and main­tain­able. Tony Greer does great work. Tobias Buckell’s web­site is a model exam­ple of this list. I work fairly afford­ably myself, and you may inquire for rates if you’re inter­ested. But seri­ously, your nephew who has a copy of Front Page 2000 isn’t going to be good enough. Spend a lit­tle money on it, and you’re going to have bet­ter results. People buy books based on cov­ers, and they’re going to judge you by how pro­fes­sional and fresh your design is as well.

5. Full sto­ries and/​or nov­els. Possibly excerpts.

Free sam­ples have been used in mar­ket­ing since the inven­tion of cap­i­tal­ism. Writers and other intel­lec­tual prop­erty cre­ators are often ter­ri­fied of this, and admit­tedly, there’s a risk that all your stuff will be stolen and you will be left pen­ni­less. If you’re lucky! Someone who comes to your web­site may not have read any­thing you have writ­ten. Post a story from a year or two. If you’re brave, put it in the Creative Commons as soon as you can. That might limit resale rights, but chalk it up as a mar­ket­ing expense. I’m not going to go into the Creative Commons too much here, as Cory Doctorow does it bet­ter than any­one else. Let me just say that I agree with him, but I under­stand those who don’t, and I don’t think this will make or break you. But try it out, and see what hap­pens. It worked for Peter Watts!

6. A way to buy your work.

Post links to Amazon, Fictionwise, what­ever. Make them promi­nent. If you have work in print for sale, it should be easy for me to buy it. Somebody really has to make this as easy as iTunes. But that’s a topic for another issue. Link, link, and link again.

7. A way to con­tact you.

Boo, spam! Nobody likes spam, but if you don’t have a way for fans or poten­tial pub­lish­ers to con­tact you, you’re miss­ing out on fan mail, hate mail, and pos­si­ble sales. There are javascript tricks you can use, or you can set up a spe­cific email address that you check on a reg­u­lar basis. You really should have this email address be at your domain above, too. Even if it for­wards to your gmail account. It’s a mat­ter of per­cep­tion. If you own a domain, and you should, use it for your email.

8. A Press Kit

I was run­ning out of ideas, so I stole this one from Tobias Buckell’s page. Short story authors prob­a­bly don’t need press kits, but nov­el­ists might. Photos, book cov­ers, and any­thing else that makes a reporter’s job eas­ier when he wants to report on your work is a very good thing.

9. A Goodies Section

I have seri­ous doubts about peo­ple lov­ing books so much that they want desk­top wall­pa­per, icons, and such, but hey, if it doesn’t cost you any­thing to make them or have them made by a designer, why not? Little rewards like this don’t cost much, but they might be just the edge you need to start a buzz about your lat­est work.Think out­side the box here. I’m hes­i­tant to give this idea away, but if your read­er­ship is young and nerdy, con­sider pub­lish­ing D&D gam­ing stats for your char­ac­ters and cre­ations. Make it easy and allow­able for your fans to play in your world. They’re not going to make any money off of it, so don’t worry. It stopped being yours when you pub­lished it.

10. Something nobody else has tried.

See the idea about about D&D stats. Do some­thing like that. Do some­thing wild and new. It’s a tough world out there for writ­ers. There are a lot of us, and I wish I could say that the best writ­ers win. But mar­ket­ing money has a direct effect on sales. If you’re read­ing this and giv­ing it seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion, then there’s a good chance that your pub­lisher doesn’t have any mar­ket­ing bucks for you. That means you need to take mat­ters into your own hands. A web­site with all the fea­tures I’ve described above costs any­where from $300-$500 from me. It could cost you thou­sands from other, equally qual­i­fied design­ers, but no mat­ter what, if you do it right, and you give it time, you’re going to make your money back. I won’t guar­an­tee it, but it’s bet­ter than noth­ing at all!

5 Things I don’t rec­om­mend doing:

1. Featuring your photo promi­nently in the design.
2. Posting your daily word counts and/​or in-​​depth analy­sis of your daily work. This is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers. Probably not so much to fans, unless they want to be a writer too. Keep a sep­a­rate blog for this.
3. Your rejec­tions. I’ve ranted about this before. Posting about your rejec­tions is some­thing you should stop doing. I can under­stand why you might do it, but keep it pri­vate. You might say some­thing you regret. Editors read web­sites too.
4. Excerpts of unpub­lished work. Sorry, nobody cares unless you’re super-​​established and semi-​​famous.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t release the whole thing online if you want.
5. Bad reviews. I’ve not read books because of the bad reviews their own authors have pub­li­cized. If you don’t link them, I won’t hear about them. This is con­tentious, but I just don’t rec­om­mend it personally.

One last thing. I haven’t been fol­low­ing my own advice here, but you can be sure that after this, I will be, both for myself and for any future clients.

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Tags: blogs, SF, Web Design