This week, we con­tinue our trend of answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers.  Right now I have enough ques­tions to get me through at least another week of posts.  So BlueTyson asked in the post of ques­tions last week:

Not for me, obvi­ously, but ‘here’s how to con­sider doing a site about a book/author’?

I have writ­ten about this sub­ject in great detail in pre­vi­ous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to pre­vi­ous posts:

• First of all, hire me.  I’m avail­able, I work at a rea­son­able rate, and I know author web­sites well.  Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
• Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your web­site should have if you’re an author.
• When con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a pro­fes­sional or even build­ing it your­self, I’ve writ­ten this arti­cle advo­cat­ing for good, standards-based design:5 Reasons Why SF/F Author Websites should be (more) standards-based
• At one time, your web pres­ence was pretty much lim­ited to a web­site and a blog.  Now, we have microblog­ging sites such as Twitter and social net­work­ing sites such as Facebook.  It behooves the seri­ous author to main­tain a pres­ence on each one of these services–basically any­where you might have fans, you should be.   One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just build­ing a web­site for an author, I attempt to develop a com­pre­hen­sive online strat­egy for them to develop an audi­ence and to main­tain their read­er­ship.  It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships through the tools that are out there.  Your web­site is impor­tant, but it’s no longer the only impor­tant thing.
• That may sound like a big time com­mit­ment, and it can be.  A good exam­ple is Twitter, which can suck up time like noth­ing else.  But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be avail­able and acces­si­ble.  Y0u need to answer ques­tions directed at you, make a few new com­ments each day, and respond to direct mes­sages.  Share your work, your­self, and your inter­ests on these ser­vices.   One thing I do is make man­ag­ing all these sites cen­trally very easy but installing plu­g­ins into the con­tent man­age­ment.   No longer am I just the guy who builds the web­site.  I also help you man­age all these tools.   A good designer/developer/web mas­ter will do so as well.

Remember: like any other busi­ness, you should think about what pur­pose a web­site serves, and what are your goals.  Everything about your web­site should reflect those goals.  It could be as sim­ple as “to sell books” or it could be com­pli­cated like “to share what I know about web design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and writ­ing. Also, cool links.  Also, to show­case my pho­tog­ra­phy and my designs.  To build read­ers for my fic­tion, but in gen­eral to make friends out there.”   Okay–so that vision isn’t very coher­ent, and could use some focus­ing.  I’m work­ing on that.  In the mean­while, you’ll still get every­thing but the kitchen sink.

Tagged as: authors, facebook, twitter, Web Design