Quick Question: Author Websites

Quick Question As you may have gathered, I'm running my own business (and loving pretty much every minute of it) these days: I'm a freelance website content manager (or 'webguy' for short...) and a significant proportion of my work involves designing, building and managing websites for genre fiction authors.

I reckon I've got a pretty good idea by now of the sort of key elements that a good author website should ideally include:

A full bibliography of the author's published work, preferably organised by chronological and/or series order.
A biography section, with press-quality photo(s) if available.
A regularly-updated news / news & views / blog section.
Contact information, both for the author and their agent(s).

Those would seem to me to be the core essentials, but in the interests of research and development, I was wondering: what do you folks - as however occasional visitors to, rather than administrators of, author websites, or even as authors and writers yourselves - think are the next most important aspects of an author website?

Content, functionality, graphic design elements, add-ons, enhancements; whatever you think adds the most to your experience of visiting an author website as a reader / interviewer / publisher / researcher, whatever your role or remit might be.

And, conversely, is there anything that you regularly see on author websites that drives you mad, or that you think is largely superfluous to requirements?

Please feel free to discuss in the comments section and I'll post a round-up of the most interesting suggestions in a week or two.

July 13, 2007 | Filed Under Freelance Work | 13 Comments

Smart thinking: Cory Doctorow on author websites

Cory Doctorow: One smart cookie Cory Doctorow is one general, all-round smart cookie.

Years ago, long before the whole blogging-thing had achieved anything like the reach or mainstream acceptance it has today, he set up boingboing, which for a long, long time was reckoned to be the most popular blog on the planet (according to Technorati's Top 100) and is still going strong at number #3.

In 2003, he released the entire text of his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [Amazon] as a free pdf download, under a Creative Commons license. Many thousands of copies were downloaded (and presumably read) completely for free, and yet the dead-tree edition of the book still sold (in Cory's own words) "fantastically well", as Charlie Stross also found when he repeated the experiment with one of his own titles a year or so later.

These days, as well as writing for boingboing and blogging at his own Craphound.com site, Doctorow writes novels, short fiction, columns, articles, you name it. So when he pens something on D.I.Y. author websites, then it rather behoves a freelance author-website-builder like me to sit up and pay attention.

At first glance, it doesn't appear to bode too well for yours truly. The gist of the article rather seems to be that authors should take their online presence into their own hands, dispense with the services of their webmaster / webmistress / webAriel - particularly in terms of updating the site by means of laborious HTML and CSS editing with manual FTP upload - and go it alone by means of one of many freely available, open source CMS systems out there, such as Wordpress, Drupal et. al.

But even though that rather sounds like it might be doing me out of a hard-earned crust, I (almost) completely agree with him. In fact it's methodology that I'm actively encouraging as many of my own author clients as possible to adopt. I've already helped set up blog-based 'news and views' pages for Tim Lebbon, Brian Ruckley, Mark Morris, Michael Marshall Smith and James Barclay, as well as full-blown, theme-blogs for Mark Chadbourn and James Barclay (again) at Jack of Ravens and Barclay Talks Sport, respectively.

Why? Because it's a damn good idea. Because if my clients have something to say to their fans and readers then of course they should be able to say it immediately. The shouldn't have to wait around for a few hours, or a day or two (hopefully not much longer these days) for a window to appear in my update-schedule.

And quite frankly, from my point of view, the less time I have spend on those laborious HTML / FTP uploads then the more time I can spend working with my clients on far more interesting online activity: blogging for a start, but also podcasting, social-networking, search engine keyword-advertising, word-of-mouth campaigns, general marketing stuff... everything I'm familiar with, or have read about, and am just itching to put into practice. So yeah, more power to the author-bloggers, says I!

Although I do have one small caveat: there is a flip-side to the D.I.Y. approach. What if the author in question isn't particularly keen, or confident enough, or simply hasn't enough time to learn the necessary basics of HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, RSS, SEO, content tagging and so forth? Not to mention graphic design and the rudiments of professional-standard layout. And then there's the accessibility issue, and the European directive on e-communication... I mean, there's a fair bit more to it than updating your news page, if you want to do it properly.

After all, the principle activity of a writer is surely to write, no? So any time spent away from that activity really ought to be justifiable. You ought to be able to prove (to yourself at least) that it's of greater added value to your career than if you'd actually got on with writing something new instead.

In which case, it seems to me that the smart / busy / technologically shy author will still want to employ their friendly, neighbourhood webguy / webgal to sort out all the aforementioned fiddly stuff - as well as things like domain name registration, website hosting, email accounts, Amazon affiliate links, mailing lists etc. - while they get on with the actual business of creating new content, whether it's for their forthcoming blog entries, their novels, their magazine columns... whatever it might be.

So yes, I wholeheartedly agree that there are definite advantages to taking control of key elements of your own online presence. But there are also advantages in getting a professional to help you through the tricky bits and get everything running smoothly before you dive on in.

Now, Cory does drop heavy hints in that sort of direction in his article. At one point he says: "It's the kind of thing you can pay someone a couple hundred dollars to do, and it's a near-sure thing that your current webmaster is already maintaining one or more blogs and is familiar with the basics," so fair's fair. And I think that what he also means by that is that you certainly shouldn't have to pay top-whack multimedia agency rates for the job. Not when a competent freelancer will be able to sort everything out for you for a fraction of the price.

And I'd like to point out one more distinct advantage to the employ-a-freelancer route that Cory doesn't really touch on: namely the ongoing benefits that you should be able to derive from being client-affiliated with a professional; particularly in terms of the propagation and implementation of new ideas.

So for instance, let's say a member of my (currently 16-strong but hopefully soon-to-be-expanding) client group comes up with an idea for a new website feature that they'd like to implement. If it's a good idea, a generic technique or tool that my other clients would also benefit from, then it's very easy for me to pass that idea on to the rest of the group. I can then perform the necessary installation on everyone's site, or set up the relevant third-party software across the board, and everyone wins.

And I do try to make a point of keeping my ear as close to the technology news ground as I reasonably can. So again, if I hear that there's a new Google tool about to become available, or a new social networking phenomena about to break, or just a new way of doing things online that I think my clients can benefit from, then I'm in a good position to let them all know what's what. Everyone wins again.

Whereas if the individual author in question doesn't have the time to read the same marketing and tech blogs, or isn't subscribed to the same mailing lists that I am (or doesn't happen to write for one of the world's most popular technology / tech-lifestyle blogs and so get to hear about everything anyhow) then they might never get to hear of a particularly useful concept or technique.

So, this afternoon I've sent an email to all my author clients to point them in the direction of Cory's article and tell them that, yes, he's quite right: they can - and should - update their own websites as frequently as they like using a blog-based platform, and that -furthermore, I'd be delighted to help them set that up, as I've already done for the aforementioned author-bloggers on my books.

And hey [utterly blatant self-plug warning: look away now if this sort of thing offends you, if it's not too late already...], if there are any authors, writers, artists or independent publishers reading this post who think they might be interested in doing something similar, then please do feel free to drop me a line. Tell me what sort of thing you have in mind, and I'll be happy to let you know if I can help out, and how much I usually charge...