Are publishers undermining their own arguments through lack of quality control?

I asked this question in the narrow context of ebook prices, addressing, specifically, the issue of lousy final layout in digital books. So much effort goes into the acquisition, editing, and marketing of a book. So much is destroyed when the final product is near-unreadable. It’s hard to argue for the value of a book when the publisher of that book throws a sloppy edition at the market.

I am talking about a digital file where every line (and paragraph) is double-spaced. Talk about your uncomfortable reading experience! The publisher should have paid me for my pain and suffering. I’ll admit it: part of me kept reading because I wanted to know if the problem was ever fixed. It wasn’t. Mind you, this happened on books (plural, multiple) with digital list prices over $20.

Then there are figures and tables and lists. Oh my. I cannot express the joy of turning a page and discovering random floating text that is either a) a very bad bookish version of an Easter egg, or b) carelessly formatted sidebar text. There is something special about tables and lists that abandon the grid in favor of a random or staggered pattern.

These are the moments when I grit my teeth because screaming might disturb the neighbors. Quality control issues undermine every publisher claim that higher prices for ebooks are justifiable (for today’s laugh, check out the pricing of mass market paperback versus ebook from HarperCollins here and one from Simon & Schuster here). Why should I, as a reader, be expected to respect the supposed value of a book when the publisher doesn’t offer the book, nor me, that same respect, via pricing and quality?

I have heard excuses. It’s Amazon’s fault! It’s because we outsource our conversion! It’s new! We’re still working out the kinks of our process (ah, gee, thanks, love that)! It’s only a small part of the market! Tables? Nobody told us that book had tables!

For years now (maybe forever), readers have been complaining about the quality of books: poorly written stories sold at hardcover prices; light or seemingly non-existent editing, particularly copyediting (for the record, there is a difference between “sheer” and “shear”); books that fall apart after one or two reads.

For years now (maybe forever), publishers have remained silent about these complaints. Readers aren’t taking this in a meek and mild fashion. And publishers don’t help their arguments with silence or, in rare responses, defensiveness. I’ve been on a “listen to readers” kick recently for good reason: they remain, once again, the people who buy books and talk about books.

This week, the industry is excited about the possibility that, finally!, Apple will sell the long-rumored tablet computer. If it does, it will be flashy, sexy, reliable, and, oh, pricey. The Financial Times reports that Apple is talking to book publishers; Business Insider uses the term “Kindle Kiler”. Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen.

But the consumer who invests in a high-priced toy (and, yes, I am looking in the mirror) will have expectations of quality. As these devices bring new digital readers into the market, these readers will expect quality and consideration. Oh, and they’re connected to the world 24/7. Right now, major corporations like Comcast are reaping rewards due to smart customer service.

Here’s hoping major publishers do the same.

• Kindle Books Ignite Ire Over Digital Dreck: Rich Jaroslovsky of Bloomberg addresses this same problem

Publishers and online retailers and content providers have this fascinating love affair with partnerships.

Stay tuned for next year’s catch-phrase, “It’s 2008, what are you thinking?*”

Today, in my normal reading, I stumbled across a press release from Barnes and Noble. In nearly-2008, “the world’s largest bookseller” has opened a Blackberry-enabled storefront. Yes, you read that right. And I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing.

“You mean they didn’t have one already?”

Blackberries (or, if you live with a user, Crackberries) have been around for just under a decade. We had a client who was an early adopter. She persisted in calling it a Blueberry; she also demanded that her website look good on her Blueberry. We couldn’t give her that, but it worked beautifully on her Blackberry. This was my first realization that mobile email was a dangerous thing. I have not changed my mind on that point.

While email remains the favorite activity for most of my Blackberry-using friends, web surfing is becoming increasingly popular (weird how my friends simply don’t do more of it). Those who surf have a fairly common complaint: websites do not look good on the Blackberry. This is bad, bad, bad.

A while back, the notion of websites that degrade gracefully was all the rage. Basically, this meant that the sites looked good on all devices (yes, that is a vast oversimplification of the notion). You’d get your website filled with bells and whistles for those who accessed the site using Firefox or Internet Explorer or one of the dozens of other browser options. For those using non-graphical browsers, the content would be served up in a neat and logical manner — no pictures, sure, but a well-organized site nonetheless. For blind users (more later), the underlying code would present a machine-readable site. For Blackberry users, ditto (presumably you have caught the pattern by now).

As mobile phone users began to take baby steps on the web, “mobile” websites made appearances. Basically, good coding allowed the website to deploy on a variety of platforms, meeting a wide range of needs, without a lot of additional effort. This kind of standards-based web development lead to maximum flexibility.

Mobile phones still offer all sorts of promise for extending online content. iPhones, certainly, give users a great web browsing experience (even with ATT’s Edge network). Blackberries, in some areas, in every hand. Mobile web is not a future promise. It’s now.

Thus I was taken by surprise by the following tidbits:

• That Barnes and Noble hadn’t already optimized its website for mobile users.
• That Barnes and Noble had to issue a press release to tell the world that it had finally created a Blackberry-specific storefront.
• That Barnes and Noble thinks average Blackberry users will read said press release.
• That, apparently, a partnership with a content aggregator is “enough”.

In near-2008, it is essential, a requirement, that websites do not exhibit the fatal flaws of 1996-era sites. So many do. It hurts. Those old-fashioned, poorly developed, horribly built sites look awful on Blackberries and phones. If you don’t make a good impression, you’re losing customers/readers/whatever. Build your website right.

I noted that I’d get back to the blind user thing. As Target recently learned, the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites. Making your website accessible for blind users is, not surprisingly, part of the same efforts that make your website accessible for other devices. It all gets back to good web development. And while I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again (because based on my general use of your websites, it needs to be said), the biggest blind user on the Internet is named Google. This good coding makes you Google friendly.

And by Google friendly, I mean every search engine on the planet. If you want to see how bad coding can affect an industry, try to find an architect using a search engine. It’s sort of like someone sold the entire profession on the concept of badly coded Flash sites. Architect websites are notoriously un-Google friendly.

We’ll skip to the end of my little list to discuss the truth about humans. Many of us believe that other members of our species behave in rational, predictable ways. This is so not true. Humans do the craziest things. Just because you tell them to go somewhere to get something, they’re gonna do things their own way. They. Will. Not. Follow. Instructions. Some don’t even read the instructions. Anyone who has ever spent time with a human knows this.

I think it’s great that Digby (not the political blogger) offers Blackberry users a great online retail experience. They have formed a partnership with one of my personal favorite online retailers (see image at the top of the page and guess), plus at least one of my offline retailers (some things need to be seen on the wrist). They are creating a unique experience for their users. Life is how it should be.

However, until Digby becomes the by-word for Blackberry online shopping, online retailers and content providers need to keep their options open. Remember: humans do crazy things. You cannot trust them to behave in the expected way. If you do not believe me, hand your mother your Blackberry. Ask her to find something online. Heck, hand your mother your mouse and let her play on your computer. I did this. I learned a lot about my mother. Some of it, she will never live down.

Publishers and online retailers and content providers have this fascinating love affair with partnerships. Like, oh, sometimes they enter into exclusive deals with service providers. Yeah, that’s the ticket, signing with a single mobile phone service. Talk about limiting your audience.

Your job, as I’m sure you know, is to cast the widest possible net. Partner with Digby. Partner with the moon. But make sure that people like my friend Paul can type www.booksquare.com into the little address bar of his Blackberry and get a living, breathing website that is readable and usable. Bells, whistles, widgets, whatever, they are very nice, but when I’m using my too-cool new iPhone, I like a site that loads fast and lets me find what I want without too much thinking or effort.

Oh, and while you’re at it, make your RSS feeds full and complete. I admit it, I didn’t for a while, and I am ashamed of myself. I know, I know, you’re worried about page views and all that stuff. But since I’m now using the world’s most expensive RSS reader, I am realizing that truncated feeds coupled with bad leads equals, oh, me wondering what I ever saw in certain blogs. If you’re not doing full feeds, you’re focusing on the wrong problem.

Happy Tuesday!

* – Subject to refinement and out-and-out change.

Technorati Tags: barnes and noble, digby, blackberry, iphone, mobile content, mobile phone, rss, target, ada, accessibility, section 508, wcag

As a general rule, biographies, as written for publications (and as opposed to those thick tomes that serve as handy doorstops), are horrible things. If you do not believe us, we insist you accept our challenge to write one immediately. Now, think about getting a root canal. What’s worse?

Told you so.

The average author bio goes something like this:

So-and-so loved to read as a child. One day, so-and-so picked up a pencil and discovered that writing stories was more fun than reading them. After attending a long string of schools and working long hours at the monkey farm, so-and-so decided to quit dreaming and start writing for real. After years of scribbling on napkins and stealing moments while the kids were hogging the bathroom, he/she published his/her first novel in [fill in the year here].

As far as we can tell, there is an automatic bio generator that authors use to create their own version of a bad thing. Pop in a few relevant details (scuba diving instead of monkey farm, legal pads instead of napkins) and voila!, you too have your very own bio.

Of course, it is not well enough to write a bio and leave it sitting on your website. Why waste all that fine effort? Why not spread your creative endeavor around the world? That way, when your fans encounter a new interview or profile of you, they will get to hear the same story all over again. Think of it like the author equivalent of sitting at the dinner table and hearing about how Uncle Harry landed the big one back in ’68. In the author version of this tale, alas, the fish remains the same size every time.

Of course, in your zeal to share your brilliant efforts, you’re also potentially subjecting yourself and your contacts to a potentially deadly disease: the Duplicate Content Penalty. It’s a horrible affliction that leads Google and other search engines to penalize websites that have duplicate content (it’s also a helpful tool for identifying plagiarized content). In this case, more is not better. Trust us on this. Go for variety when you have to share your bio with other websites.

The thing about these bios is that they offer no insight into the soul of an author. The person behind the bio could just as likely be an insurance salesperson for all the creativity exhibited in the brief paragraphs that grace the bio page. Give your readers something more, give them something unique (hint: you are not the only author who read a lot of books when you were a kid). If all else fails, Make Something Up (or at least stretch the truth in an amusing fashion).

Our challenge to you this week is for you to go forth and write a better, more interesting bio for your website. Also your blog. And your profile at your publisher’s website (oh, those are the bios of death, are they not?). Make yourself sound as interesting as your books. After all, if your bio is boring, what does that say about your other work.

In the meantime, we will consider applying our humble efforts to other “Back To Basics” topics such as linking and black backgrounds with red fonts. And lord help us if we see one more spinning, floating, dancing, blinking thing on a post-2000 website. Especially if it involves unicorns, rainbows, or fairies. There is no reason to exhibit that kind of bad taste in public.

Our commenter, Janet Szabo, who writes about knitting (it’s like the gods are telling us to finish the !@#$ project we started last fall), and she did the math, realizing that selling through Amazon resulted in lower profit numbers for her. For a self-published author not moving large numbers of product, it’s a logical assumption. But what caught our beady little eye was something she said:

It’s amusing, though, that people think that if it isn’t available through Amazon, it must not be available at all. I run an e-mail list for knitters interested in the topic I write about. A new member joined last week and posted that she looked for my book on Amazon and they said it wasn’t available, and did anyone know where she could get a copy? I responded that if she just Googled “Janet Szabo,” my website, and the websites of several hundred stores that carry my book, came up.

Szabo has chosen to sell directly through her website instead of Amazon. She reaches readers through a mailing list (because, well, mailing lists are, like, really important) and word-of-mouth. She earns more per book, but as she herself acknowledges, there are readers out there who don’t necessarily do the math the same way she does. While we understand the desire to make lots of money, we also believe one has to face certain facts: consumers do not always behave in logical ways.

The author who sells directly through his or her website or other venues, eschewing Amazon for whatever reason they wish, is necessarily engaged in audience-limiting behavior. Szabo’s comments indicate that her readers, while very much interested in her product, also weighed other options, such as free shipping into their decisions. Do not underestimate the power of free shipping. It drives consumers to do insane things like, oh, purchase extra books to make the dollar threshold for said free shipping (it is one of those life conundrums that people will spend more money in order to get something free). Consumer convenience is another factor — the more places someone has to look for a product, the more likely they are to give up and go home (home, in this case, being a relative concept).

Then there are those who don’t realize that options exist. They believe that whatever retail outlet they choose is the only retail outlet available to them. It’s the creatures of habit thing that plagues our species, you know.

Each author needs to do the math and decide if the cost of doing business with Amazon is worth the risk. But don’t only do the dollars and cents. Factor in the human cost — you, too, are a consumer, dear author. How do you behave when it comes to buying your heart’s desire?

This rant, like so many, was prompted by a sudden deluge of review requests sent to our BS address. This tells us that someone out there took the time to locate this address, but not enough time to actually read what is posted here. For example, a cursory glance will show that we don’t review books on this site. To the best of our knowledge, we have never posted a book review here. We’ve considered doing so, but, being naturally lazy, haven’t executed.

However, if one were to look around, one would discover that we do review elsewhere. And, a moment at that particular site will reveal the type of fiction we review and, most importantly, our review style. You will note immediately that while we like American Folk Art, we do not have the necessary qualities nor inclination to review a book dedicated to said Folk Art. Yet, someone, for some reason, decided to query us on that particular subject. We read the query, because it was, oddly, a follow-up to a previous request and so poorly written and formatted, it took our breath away. It takes effort to create an email that looks like a train wreck, and we applaud that level of work.

Writing to the wrong reviewers is not only a waste of your time, it’s a waste of the reviewer’s time. You may believe that sending out hundreds of queries to hundreds of reviewers is an efficient process, but the technical term for this sort of behavior is spamming. If you are trying to present a professional image, you are failing miserably. If you’re trying to get a review, well, you’re failing miserably there, too.

Review queries should be well-written and they should be properly targeted. If you subscribe to the theory that there is no such thing as bad publicity, you need to spend some time in our inbox. If you cannot write a halfway decent letter to a potential reviewer, that does not speak well to your ability to write a halfway decent book.  In other words, the proprieter of this website is that last person on Earth you want reviewing your book…if you take our meaning.

Finding reviewers for your book is hard work, and you have to do it. Do not take shortcuts and assume that a list of reviewers you found on an obscure website is accurate and useful. It probably hasn’t been updated since 1999. Of course, if you like writing dead email addresses and targeting defunct websites, we would never stop you. If you prefer actually garnering a review, we suggest that you compile a list of potential reviewers, visit their sites, read the reviews, check out querying guidelines if they exist, and then write a request for review to the appropriate people.

Yeah, not as much fun as sending a thousand untargeted, misspelled messages, but, you know, easier than actually writing a book.

Rant over.

Lynne Scanlon notes that making money the traditional way (selling a book to a publishers, receiving an advance, earning out an advance, waiting months and sometimes years for royalties to be paid) doesn’t really work for her. Let’s all face facts: if you’re writing to get rich, you might also want to consider winning the lottery as a back-up plan (also, note our advice below). Scanlon has decided to (catch phrase alert!) monetize her blog.

It is a natural urge to try to make money doing what you love or do best. Especially if you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people reading you ever month. If you compare the daily readership of some blogs to the sales of most authors, the differences would make most publishers cry. However, the financial models are very different.

Scanlon discusses potential avenues for earning revenues (ads, ads, and sponsorships). These are, indeed, viable sources of money. We have had some modest success along these lines with other sites in the BS family. However, that success came not because we slapped up ads and counted the money as it rolled in. There are three basic elements that are essential if you’re serious about making your online ventures pay. These are not big secrets, by the way.

• Niche – You need to figure out where your blog fits into the grand scheme of life. If you regularly visit grocery stores, you’ll notice that there are very few general interest magazines on the racks. Each and every publication differentiates itself (not all successfully) by targeting a specific niche. The Real Simple niche — people looking to streamline their lives in an upscale-ish sort of way — is very different than the Budget Living niche.

  To be a successful paid blogger, you need to know your niche and write about it. Sites such as Boing Boing get a pass on this rule because they have built a massive audience by targeting a wide range of interests with a geek perspective. Boing Boing is an exception, and if you read it regularly, you’ll understand why. In the world of blogs, specific trumps general.

• Content – People do not generally come to your blog (or website) to admire your brilliant design. Okay, if it’s a brand-spanking new look, maybe you’ll get a rush of traffic admiring your lovely colors and hot boxes, but generally design doesn’t a destination make. People visit blogs and websites for content.

  Content comes in many forms: text, sounds, and images. We’re going to focus on text, because, well, our particular niche is very much into the written word. You’ll notice that A-List blogs have certain things in common, mainly good, strong writing with distinctive voices. Original content matters; repurposed, cookie-cutter content doesn’t work. Hmm, sounds like the publishing industry is dictating the rules of the Internet, no?

  Your content must be engaging and interesting. It must inform people about the topic at hand. It must be evergreen. Okay, it should be evergreen — content that gets digested by search engines and ranks high in Google (or other search engines) when people type in key phrases. Content that drives traffic to your site long after the post is off the home page. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule. There are always exceptions.

  You would think that writers would be particularly inclined toward creating good content. Let us add one more rule: frequent content. You don’t have to post twelve times a day, but you do need to post often. Daily, weekly, whatever your schedule, but the more you write, the more content. If it’s good content, then that leads to more traffic. Vicious circle, yes.

  In other words, bloggers who make serious money off their sites often treat their blogs like full-time jobs. Or part-time jobs if they’re thinking the money will be less serious. Successful bloggers are constantly writing and networking and doing all the things that writers do to sell their words. Because there’s one more key element of paid blogging:

• Traffic – We’re not going to pretend we understand CPMs and all that advertising lingo. There are books, we’re sure, that explain it all. But we do understand the basic laws of traffic: you don’t make money off your blog if you don’t have decent traffic. Ten, twenty, one hundred visitors a day is simply not going to cut it (unless you have a high-paying niche and click-happy readers).

  Building website traffic is an art form, meaning it’s far more complex than we can get into here and now. You need a target audience, you need content — fresh and evergreen, and you need to employ traffic-building strategy. Very rarely do you build it and they come. As we’ve discussed in the past, this involves linking to others and community and writing articles that people want to link to, posts that people want to pass among their friends. Work, you know.

  You can, possibly, buy traffic, but that capital outlay won’t do you much good if there’s nothing behind it. People who come once won’t come twice if there’s no reason to make the effort. Have we mentioned the part about good writing and distinctive voice?

Bloggers do get paid for their work, and writers, especially, are well-positioned to take advantage of the medium. In order to make money off your site, you need to make your site a destination. Throwing up a bunch of links or grabbing canned content won’t do the job. And thus ends today’s rant.

Technorati Tags: writing, publishing, blogging, paid blogging, content

First, the tough love. To those authors who insist upon adding a musical interlude to the web experience, stop. Read carefully: your taste in music sucks. There is absolutely no song that you can include as part of your web experience that will sound good to anyone, including you. If we want to hear music, we will go ahead and play the song of our choice. We don’t want to hear yours. Ever.

This public service announcement has been sponsored by each and every person who has ever suffered an unwanted bad music experience on a website.

Now on to your parenting skills. You have your first website, and it is a lot of work. Sort of like a practice website — you know that with the next, you will be much better. The HTML will go on without poking delicate design. You will remember that websites eat a lot, and you will necessarily lose precious sleep, especially during those crucial first months. When the second site comes around, you breathe a sigh of relief. You’ve done this before. You know exactly how to proceed.

So you go forth and lavish love and attention on this second site. You’ve discovered that this site, whom you’ve affectionately nicknamed “Your Little Blog”, is easy to maintain. Still eats a lot, but it’s not like you have to figure out the recipe before cooking. Before long, your first site, that poor innocent lost on the web, is all but forgotten. It’s still wearing a two-year old bio!

A website is a blog is a website. Rather than leaving a dusty, abandoned website with a shiny link to your blog — which gets updated more often than some people eat — dump the old site and move your blog right in. Use the pages feature of your blogging software to create static pages for things like your life story and books (have we mentioned that WordPress is lovely at this stage of life?). Plug in those other features you deem necessary, find a very nice outfit for the thing, or, better, hire someone to give you just the right look for your site.

And acknowledge that you can have the best of all worlds: a website that is regularly updated. You love blogging. It’s easy and you don’t have to know much more than how to work a word processor to add stuff to the Internet. It’s lovely. Voila! You have a website, you have a blog, and you don’t look like you’ve left that poor innocent first site out there alone.

You can thank us later.

Technorati Tags: authors, publishing, blogs, websites

Today’s topic is links. You are familiar with them, we trust, but just in case, here is an example. In this case, we are linking to Jill Monroe’s blog, mostly because we cannot believe that she puts pictures like that on the Internet for the whole world to see. You will note that nobody around here does stuff like that.

If you will allow us to continue with our cocktail party analogy (and, really, how can you stop the mighty force that is BS?), there comes a time in every party-goer’s life where conversation must be initiated. You can only hold up the wall for so long before you have no choice: you have to say “Hi” to your fellow wallflower(s). It can be a short “Hey, I see you have a great fondness for drywall” or a more detailed “So, you seem quite partial to the pattern of that wallpaper, but don’t you think the eggshell texture of this paint makes the room seem larger?”

Yes, yes, you do have a third option. You can slip out the back door while nobody’s looking. If that is your plan, read the rest of this post, but do not take any of the advice we offer. You do not need us. You do not need anybody.

So links are conversational gambits. We link to Jill’s blog not only because we really think the world needs to see her mullet, but also to let her know, “Hey, still alive, still breathing, and, yes, still making fun of you.” If we didn’t know Jill as well as we do, then our initial link would be akin to “Hi, pleased to meet you.” Sure, it can also come off as a desperate plea for attention, but who hasn’t done that at a party? At least links don’t come with really tacky lampshades.

Hmm, that, like most of our assertions, is not necessarily true.

Linking is how the Internet holds conversations. We link to Jill, she links back to us. One of Jill’s friends (let’s call her, oh, Gena) sees our conversation and says, “I have something to say about all this.” Gena’s friends saunter over and they invite their friends. Before long, it’s like a rave without the loud music.

Links are cheap and easy and a great way to draw attention to your website. “But BS,” you say, completely bewildered, “you are telling us to drive people away.” We can only offer the reassurance that comes from years of experience: they will come back. It might take a little time and a lot of perseverance (but, really, you have plenty of both, right?), but the link love will be returned.

So, why are links so all-important. In a word, search engines (yes, two words). Search engines like links — the more links pointing to your site, the more credibility you have in the eyes of the blind searchbots. This is why spammers do horrible, horrible things like insert faux comments into your blog and fake trackbacks and other nasty tricks. This is why you must not allow spam comments on your site. Do not give credence to these evil trolls. They are trying to steal your hard work because they are too lazy and too selfish to do their own work.

Ah, right, we got off track. You want incoming links. At the risk of oversimplifying things, you want links from the popular websites. You want links from older, more established domains. In order to get these links, you must give these links. Also, write really good content that is link-worthy. Or post a picture of yourself with a mullet. Your choice.

Organic link-building (i.e., not paying a company to get you linked from everywhere) is worth the effort because you are not only building your traffic, but you’re also building your community. It is often noted that the blogosphere is somewhat incestuous. That’s true — you tend to fall in with your peer group, while each individual in that group has outside interests that sometimes overlap, sometimes don’t. There’s a reason this Internet thing is called a web.

Oh, you don’t have to have a blog to do all this linking we’re talking about. Blogs are tools, not complete answers.

Be generous with your links. Give them away like candy on Halloween. Spread them throughout your site without fear. Do not be selfish and think that linking elsewhere will drive your traffic away. Sure people hop around the Internet — but they will come back if you play the game right.

Which reminds us: we owe you all a post on the virtues of good content. Never fear, we will not forget.

Technorati Tags: blogs, mullets

Okay, we’ll allow you to do this: throw up a blog and then come right back here. Many hosting services allow you to do a “one click” (a misnomer if ever one existed) install of blogging platforms like WordPress. You can get the Google dance* started while you’re doing the hard work. Karen, we hear you groaning now. The first, biggest, and most important question you can ask yourself is “What do I want to do with my website?” This seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Au contraire, nous amis…

So, yeah, you’re an author and you’re trying to sell…hmm, what is it that you’re trying to sell? Yourself? A current book? Non-fiction work? A short story collection? Your skills? It’s a big, bad world out there — who are you trying to reach? Take your time, think about it. Off the top of our pointy little head, we can come up with four or five potential audiences for your website. And that’s without even trying.

We’re not, by the way, including your mother, father, or grandmother in that first pass. But, yes, if they are still around to drive you nuts, they’re a potential audience for your website. Also that one ex who you still feel it’s necessary to impress even though you’re so over that relationship.

Authors should be particularly good at this exercise because it’s an extension of the world-building they do on a regular basis. How do you want your site to look? How can you reach your various audiences via content and other features? What can you offer that nobody else is offering? Look around at a lot of author, musician, painters, heck, anyone’s websites and make notes. What works, doesn’t work, piques your interest, makes you groan.

(Note: music is always bad unless you’re a really good musician and/or band and don’t start the music automatically. Let the user click on a link to hear your favorite song. Please. Thank you.)

Carefully consider your website. It matters. It’s going to change over time, that’s fine, but if you build in a flexibility up front, it will be cheaper and easier to adapt as your needs change. But start first with a plan. The features you deem necessary on your website are going to be the determining factors when it comes to choosing underlying technology. They will also factor into the ultimate cost.

Think as long as you need to. That’s why we gave you the blog out (and that may end up being your ultimate solution). If it’s worth doing this for your career — and we do not see why it is not — it’s worth doing right.

* – Google doesn’t automatically give high ranking to new domains. In fact, due to the sheer number of new sites that go up every day, it might take a while before Google gets around to spidering your site. Yes, there are ways to help yourself. Content, content, content. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: authors, publishing, publicity