{"id":259913,"date":"2010-02-01T13:58:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T18:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kurtisscaletta.com\/home\/?p=2227"},"modified":"2010-02-01T13:58:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T18:58:27","slug":"five-rules-about-web-presence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/259913","title":{"rendered":"Five Rules About Web Presence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have presented a couple of times on Web Presence for authors, and have thought about making my thoughts on that topic a regular feature on this blog, but so far I haven’t. The main reason is, although about half the people who check in here regularly are writers, I think of my target audience as readers, teachers, librarians, and parents — people who don’t want to read a bunch of shop talk. And being thoughtful about audience and what they might want to read is often the first thing I tell people about web presence.<\/p>\n

However, I thought I’d drop a few rules on people who might be Googling \u201cweb presence for authors\u201d and want a quick list of advice.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Do have some kind of web presence. A three page website with contact info, a list of your books, and upcoming events are fine. When people Google your name or a book title and click \u201cI feel lucky,\u201d don\u2019t you want to decide what they see?<\/li>\n
  2. Update that site regularly. People want to know that you are home.<\/li>\n
  3. Do not use a free webhosting site that will place ads and other rubbish on your professional website. Pay for hosting. It\u2019s not that expensive and is well worth the price.<\/li>\n
  4. Don\u2019t pay your web-savvy nephew forty bucks to put up your website (unless of course your web-savvy nephew is a grown-up professional web designer who usually gets paid twenty times that amount). When you hire a professional, you aren\u2019t paying them for technical expertise\u2014you can learn all of that in an hour. What you\u2019re paying a professional for is design sensibility and marketing savvy. I think the DIY approach is fine if you know what you\u2019re doing, but I am constantly seeing really bad websites for excellent authors and nobody would know what excellent authors they are if they were just judging by the website\u2026. And I always assume that a combination of thrift and nepotism are to blame.<\/li>\n
  5. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, book trailers, and so forth are all fine if you want to do them, but I am of the opinion that you should do anything beyond #4 unless you want to and it feels natural. A lot of authors say they feel they have to do a book trailer or a blog (or they are told to do so by their editor or publisher) and stress out over it. I think it\u2019s better to not create any aspect of a web presence that you don\u2019t intend to maintain and\/or which you aren\u2019t comfortable with. It\u2019s true that they can be an effective part of your web presence, but only if they are used well.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I have presented a couple of times on Web Presence for authors, and have thought about making my thoughts on that topic a regular feature on this blog, but so far I haven’t. The main reason is, although about half the people who check in here regularly are writers, I think of my target audience […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":816,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/816"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}