Writing Content

Publishing Your Work On An Author Website

The name of the game is content. In the online world, "content" means the stuff you put on your website that gets people to come and visit. If your content is good, they may stay awhile, or come back another time, or that best of possible outcomes, tell all their friends. The web is rapidly overfilling with all sorts of rich media, including full motion video and streaming audio. When you've become a successful author with a large fan base, you might want to add some of that stuff to your website, but when you're starting out, it's neither necessary nor particularly useful. You see, the effort and the expense involved in creating rich media only makes sense if you have a large number of visitors willing to sit through it, whether it's educational or entertainment. Merely having video and audio files available for playing won't attract anybody to your website to play them. Despite the best efforts of some of the smartest people on the globe, Internet search remains largely a text based phenomena.

Fortunately, text is what we do as authors, which is why the Internet is an ideal place for an unknown to build a platform and become known. The only content required to build a serious author website is text, engaging text, and lots of it. If your work can be enhanced by photographs or graphics, adding them is an easy way to increase the value of the site in the eyes of your readers. But images aren't vitally necessary, and won't bring you many visitors in and of themselves. It's the text you write that really matters to the search engines, and they parse and dissect that text in an attempt to present their users with useful results. The search engines don't care too much about how finely tuned your grammar is or the skill with which you turn a phrase, which is why I encourage you to publish draft material as you write it. I also encourage you to register a copyright for your website content on a regular basis.

Some authors spend so much time polishing their work that they treat content creation as some full-time task that's beyond their capacity. I'm not going to tell you to write badly, but I am going to tell you that in the initial stages of creating a website, there's something to be said for letting your inner slob hang out and getting the job done. We aren't talking about a poetry website here, if your goal is to become acknowledged as a professional poet, you're doomed even if you do succeed. The whole point of creating a author website is to contribute to your chances of commercial success, to be picked up by a quality trade publisher or to promote your published books. The text content on your website fills that function by attracting readers through search engines and letting them read for free. In over ten years of publishing on the Internet, I've received well over ten thousand e-mails from strangers, and while one in a thousand may write to point out this or that typo, nobody has ever complained about getting to read the content for free. People have better things to do with their time than to read web pages they don't find informative or entertaining, and if they stay on your site long enough read something and find your e-mail address, it means the content is doing its job.

So what is this text content I keep going on about, and how do you write it? The most obvious place for authors to start gathering content for their websites is from material they've already written. It could be book manuscripts, research notes, published or unpublished papers written for professional or educational requirements. It could be the letters or e-mails you wrote your friends or relatives while researching the setting for a fictional scene set in Florence, though you might want to edit out any references to the personal lives of your correspondents. As long at it's related in some way to online presence you're trying to establish and it's not stolen from another writer, it's all good starting grist for the mill. There's nothing wrong with having a website contain content on multiple, entirely unrelated fields, you just have to organize it so that neither your readers or the search engines get confused. The only caveat I'd offer on letting it all hang out is that you run the risk of offending people who might otherwise become readers and book buyers. Politics is a pretty dumb subject to discuss on your website unless publishing political tomes is your goal, and indulging in personal biases (don't we all hate mauve haired people) is a pretty stupid move unless you're trying to build a platform as a racist. Remember the joke about the two old lady's complaining about the food in the Catskills? One says, "The food here is horrible," and the other says, "Yes, and the portions are too small." The problem with most existing author websites I've reviewed is simple. They have the wrong content presented the wrong way, and not nearly enough of it.

The challenge in using content that you've already written is a question of how much to give away and how to structure the presentation on your website. If the material isn't part of a manuscript or a published book, the more the better. If you're talking about a book you're in the process of writing, like this one I'm writing now, I'm comfortable with posting the rough draft as I go along and making the decision about how much of the finished book to put online when I get there. In the meantime, the draft chapters can start the page maturation process that will help them draw visitors down the road when they are replaced with the permanent content. It also helps with search engine visibility to clump like bits of your website together, which will get a more technical treatment later on. Publishing a web pages isn't like printing 10,000 books, the modern equivalent of carving something in stone. If you decide you want to do a complete rewrite, drop a key concept or character, or add a major new facet to your work, you can always change it. New visitors to your website will never know that the older version existed, and returning visitors don't have any grounds for complaint. Remember, they haven't paid for anything.

Using pre-existing related content, such as a travelogue you don't plan to bring out as a book, research notes, letters home and other writing, doesn't carry with it any question of how sales may be impacted. The rule of thumb for design with such content is to break it up into the largest chunks that can be clearly described in a title. For example, if it was important for your book research to determine what activity took place on the Brooklyn Bridge every Sunday morning for a year, I'd put all 52 weeks of it on a single page, rather than creating 52 individual short pages that will inevitably repeat similar themes. On the other hand, if you collected a couple dozen local recipes on a writing related trip, they should each get their own page, unless there are families of recipes using similar ingredients. In other words, similar bits of related content should always get clumped together to give weight to your authority, while diverse bits of related content should get their own web pages. All related content is then connected through the site navigation, the clickable links you usually find in the margins of web pages.

But the most effective content for building a platform that establishes you as the go-to person for a particular subject is content `you write specifically for that purpose. The problem that confronts many authors is that they aren't exactly sure what platform they should be building. It's a particularly thorny question for fiction writers, who can't count on their finished writing to make a whole lot of sense to search engines. The visitors a search engine sends to a fiction page are usually looking for some information that happens to be mentioned on the page, but not in the context that the visitor is seeking. The likelihood of converting a misdirected visitor into a reader or a customer is very low. But most fiction is typically written in genres, and fiction writers tend to be knowledgeable about the genre in which they are writing. The best approach for an unknown fiction writer trying to build a website platform is to write nonfiction about the genre, about the classics of the art, about the books written by other authors, and perhaps most importantly, the publishers and editors of those other books. In this way, the aspiring authors can do their homework about the business they are trying to break into at the same time they are building a web presence. Of course, it makes sense to present their own fiction on the site as well, even prominently. Nobody will complain.

Of course, one of the main points of publishing online is to find out how people react to your work before commiting to killing a tree. The most practical way to get feedback over the Internet is by e-mail, but that can also open the door to even more spam than you are already getting. With twelve years experience of posting my contact information online, the best compromise I've come up with is represented by my contact page. My e-mail address doesn't appear as real text for the bots to pick up, but as a graphic. The instructions tell you to add the number 1903 to the subject line to ensure passage thorugh my spam filter. I tell you I don't accept attachments (people try sending them anyway). Having a contact page rather than placing the information on every page of my website means that I only have to change it in one place, if I decide to change the code, the address, or go on vacation.