Author Investment

Website Cost In Time And Money For Writers

Paying for a unique domain name costs less per year than a decent dinner for one in a restaurant, and high quality website hosting is available for $10 per month. So the cash carrying cost for an author website will be less than $150 per year, unless you buy a lot of services you don't need, like fancy shopping carts and other extensions. This cost includes all of the usage tracking you need to fully understand what's going on with your website. Website design software can be had for free, you can use free services like Blogger.com to publish a professional blog to your own website, and you can even generate web pages out of most word processors if you check for "HTML" under the "save as" options. I think it's best in the long run to find a nice little website design package that suits you, try out free download versions and then pay for the full version when you find the one you like. Stay away from expensive design packages intended to produce flashy sites to wow visitors. The sites they produce work poorly with the search engines, and you'll waste a ton of time on aesthetics that you should be spending writing or becoming known.

The only real out-of-pocket cost to establish a website comes if you aren't willing to learn the basics of creating and publishing pages, and you end up paying somebody. I would encourage you very strongly to learn to do it yourself, even if you have to pay somebody to teach you Website design requires a knowledge of the written content, and as the writer, you're the pretty much the only one who will have that knowledge. But, if you do have to hire somebody, don't hire a professional website designer. Hire a student or a neighbor who has built their own simple website, and pay by the hour for closed-end tasks. A simple design like the page you are looking at now is the best way to start, feel free copy the layout. It's a table with two columns and two rows, my company logo is in the top row, left column, and the title and copyright management information are in the top row, right column. The navigation is in the bottom row, left column (along with repeated copyright information) and the main content, along with bottom navigation, is all in the bottom row right column. Here's the whole design in miniature, with the table cell borders shown:

Top Left - Logo Top Right - Title and Copyright

Bottom Left - Navigation, Contact and Copyright Bottom Right - Content and Bottom Navigation

Note that the simple table form automatically resizes to fit within screen being used if possible. It won't always look exactly the same, but who cares? This section of my website, the thirteen pages with the navigation bars, titles, and space for the content, took less than a half hour to set up, It's just a question of creating the first simple page with all the navigation links, and than saving it under thirteen different page names. You may hear the word "template" in talking to web designers. That first page created serves as a template in this case, it doesn't need be any more complicated than that. After you have the collection of pages created, you just go to each one, edit the title, and start filling in the content in this bottom right table cell. Cutting and pasting from your word processor works fine. Once you have a simple template, you can actually create web pages in the WordPad program that's been part of Windows Accessories forever without learning HTML. When I feel like editing a web page from a computer other than my own, I just save it from the web, use WordPad to make the changes, and send it back.

If you are hiring somebody to do these tasks,sit and do it with them. The amounts of time involved are so small that you can certainly spare it, you'll learn something, and maybe they'll learn something as well. The hourly wage for such work is going to vary depending where you live, but $20/hour is great pay for a kid most places, you might want to go higher with an adult since you won't be using a whole lot of their time, and everybody has overhead to deal with. The work of creating the website is not about the template, the navigation, or the logo. It's about writing the content. Writing content accounts for more than 99% of the time invested, the opportunity cost to get your website online. After that, the time invested goes into getting links, learning from the usage statistics, interacting with people who contact you, and writing more content. The design function is so trivial that I'd go without mentioning it at all if I thought I could get away with it!

The author 's work begins with writing the initial content. There's nothing to be gained by putting up an empty website before you have any content because you won't get any links or visitors. The amount of material required to get a website off to a healthy start isn't huge, just enough to create a resource. Even a single page website will sometimes work, though the content had better be pretty compelling. I've published web pages with just a couple hundred words that draw hundreds of visitors a day, though these pages usually include photo illustrated how-to type material. Web pages that are primarily text, with the exception of blog posts, generally run one or two thousand words on my website.So a collection of pages like these thirteen pages about building an author website will total up over twenty thousand words, or around seventy pages of trade paperback content, depending on formatting. Simply for putting the pages up on the web and getting a few incoming links, I'd expect to eventually see them bring in around a hundred visitors a day. If they prove to be popular and draw extensive linking from authority sites, that number could go up to a thousand visitors a day. If nobody cares and the pages don't draw any links, the number could go as low as a couple dozen, as writing about websites for any reason is an extremely competitive area.

After the initial investment in time and money of launching the website, every author will have a very different outlook as to how much work to invest in the website going forward. For unpublished authors, I believe the more time you invest in writing new books, which are also new web content, the better the chance you will eventually have a platform that either let you publish and sell your own books or earn you a trade contract. It's not automatic that by writing more you'll get more quality visitors and links. It depends both on your writing and your subjects. There really are authors out there producing minute and detailed descriptions of their day-to-day lives, and while anthropologists of the future may take notice, nobody else does. And, no matter how good and relevant your writing is, it does take some initial effort to get a few links so the search engines will take it seriously.

As I wrote in the chapter about website promotion, establishing yourself in a public forum simply by answering questions or sharing your experiences is the best way to start meeting other writers and professionals. It takes an investment of time and trust. In my active list participation days, simply keeping up with the posts and side chatter in a professional author's forum cost me over an hour a day. The hidden cost was counted in procrastination. It's easy to fall into a pattern of replacing productive work with professional correspondence that feels productive, or at least holds out the promise that it has some intrinsic reputation value. If you have an income and a lot of time on your hands, I suppose there are worse ways to spend your time, but being an online chatterbox isn't a living.

I have to admit a similar problem with studying website statistics. Spending a ten minutes a week once you know what to look at is more than enough to monitor the progress of your site and pick up on any big events, good or bad. I probably spend fifteen minutes a day, sometimes longer, primarily looking at the new links coming into my site or trying some of the key phrases I see in search engines to see how I'm ranking. Based on the results, I'll occasionally waste a whole day (over the course of a week) on SEO, Search Engine Optimization. I'll try to tweak a page to do just a little better for a give search phrase by changing the internal navigation links on my site, editing the text with that phrase in mind, or trying to find one or two new relevant sites to link me. The former two are probably a complete waste of time these days and may even be counterproductive if the search engine assesses an SEO penalty. Getting new links is always useful, even if it doesn't help with the search presence for that phrase. SEO can be almost as addictive as blogging, so you're better off trying not to fine tune your results as long as your already reaching the audience you'd hoped to attract.

One of the newer options for building your profile on the web that does attract me is creating author videos, due to Google's recent integration of YouTube results with their basic search, . I'm taking about lecture type material here, or how-to, rather than dramatic readings. It's a very different use for video than all of the budding entertainers who sing their song or dance their dance, and from my perspective, the main use to the author is to get a link to their website in there. But, I can see it turning into a huge waste of time with some writers, who are often aspiring script writers in any case. We all have a limited amount of time in the day, so if making it as a writer is a thing, build the traffic to your writing website until you can either see that it's working or that it's not going to work.