Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We’ve been talking about blogging for the last week or so. We’ve covered various aspects of building a web site. Today, we’ll talk about blogging software.

I’m no expert on all the choices available in blogging software. One of the most popular options is WordPress, which you can get at www.WordPress.org. Note that if you don’t want to host your blog on your own site, you can host it at www.WordPress.com.

Installing WordPress is fairly easy, but you do need to follow the directions. You have to have a web site that lets you create a database. (Most all hosting services let you create an absurd number of databases on your site.) It’s easy to do–they provide a tool to create it. Then you just take the information that tells WordPress where your database lives on the internet and edit a few lines in the right file and post it to your web site. WordPress gives complete directions on how to do this.

Many hosting services give you a automatic installation option for WordPress, which makes the whole operation a five minute procedure that is supposed to be fail-safe. As Craig noted today:

As for getting a blog on your site,if your site has cpanel with Fantastico, then installing Wordpress on your site is extremely simple.

Then you just configure the controls, and you have a great blogging platform right on your site.

WordPress gives you many different “themes” which let you customize the look and feel of your site. You can choose colors, fonts, graphics, and all that sort of thing. Or if you know PHP and CSS, you can hack into one of their themes to do whatever you want.

I know there are other blogging software packages, but it’s been quite awhile since I looked into them, and things have changed since then. WordPress has many “plugins”. These are extra little tools you can add to your blog to do special things. I don’t have a lot of plugins on my blog, but I am using the Akismet spam filter, which is extremely good.

Liz noted this:

BTW, there’s another option for blog hosting. I write my family blog on Blogger but then Blogger posts (publishes) it to my own website via FTP. All the blog content files live on my site; I can back them up, etc. Let me know if you want me to write down the specifics.

Randy sez: That’s very handy! That gives you the best of both worlds. You don’t have to install the blog on your site, but you still get the content there. I went to the Blogger web site but didn’t see any details on this. So Liz, can you give us some details? Is there anywhere on the Blogger site that explains how it works?

Gerhi pointed out something I hadn’t noticed:

Randy, Mary DeMuth’s home page looks great but it is not search engine friendly. If you look at the source code you will see that the only ‘content’ on her home page is in the meta description. That is not enough.

Randy sez: Yikes, you’re right! I didn’t look at the source code until just now (using “View Source” on my browser). Looks like there is some AJAX going on under the hood. I don’t know if Google can index this kind of content, but I verified that it does not index the content on Mary’s site. (I did an exact search for a long phrase that I clipped from one of her pages. There were no results on Google.)

That’s it for today! Tomorrow, I’d like to switch gears and talk more about what you do WITH your blog in order to use it as a marketing tool. (This does not mean that your blog is going to turn you into a shameless hussy. It does mean that your blog will raise your visibility in the world so that people who are interested in the kind of things you’re interested in will easily find you. That is marketing at its kindest and gentlest. I think it’s the best kind.)

We’ve been talking about blogs for several days now. In recent days, I took a quick detour into the nuts and bolts of web sites, because I strongly believe that a blog should live on an author’s web site, not on one of the free sites that host your blog. Yesterday, I posted a long, long discussion of what goes into creating a web site. At the end of that process, either you or your web designer will have a bunch of HTML files that live on your computer (or your web designer’s).

What happens next?

Remember that a web site isn’t visible to anyone until it’s “hosted” on a server somewhere. People can then point their browser to that server and see what’s on your site.

But how does it get to the server in the first place?

The answer is that you have to upload them to the server, using “FTP” software. (”FTP” means “file transfer protocol” and you don’t have to know very much at all in order to use this software.)

Most web development software has “FTP” software built right in. DreamWeaver, FrontPage, Freeway, and even the free NVu package all have it. Typically, you have a folder on your computer that has all your HTML files. You want that to go to a similar folder on your server. So you point your software to the source folder on your computer and to the destination folder on your server and tell it to transfer the files. The FTP software does everything else. Of course, if you have a webmaster doing your site, they’ll handle that.

Once you’ve transferred your files to your server, there’s nothing more to do. Your web site is live and anyone in the world can see it.

If that sounds too simple, it’s because this part of the process really is quite simple. The only tricky part is getting the exact folder on your server. Different hosting services use slightly different naming conventions, so you just have to ask your hosting service to tell you how to do it. One reason I like GoDaddy is that they have a 24/7 help service that you can call to get things straightened out. I’ve sometimes had to wait on the phone for a bit, but they’ve generally been extremely polite and helpful.

I’d now like to respond to some of the comments that folks have posted here in the last few days.

Carrie wrote:

Domain name, check.
Site design, not even sure how.
Content, not ready yet.

Oh Randy, I hope you’re right about this.

Randy sez: Carrie, I’m right. Listen, you can do this. You’ll need help along the way, but there are millions of people who’ve made web sites, so how hard can it really be? There is somebody, somewhere who knows how to do anything you can imagine. (I am not that someone, by the way. People sometimes email me to ask if I’ll design their web site. I tell them that I’m too expensive. A typical web designer charges $50 to $75 per hour. My hourly rate is unfortunately a lot higher than that, and I’m not any good at graphics, so it would be crazy to hire me.)

Karla asked:

My question is, what if you have a website and provide a link to your blog but your blog isn’t actually “on” the site? Would that be OK for us starving artists just starting out? Blogger is so easy to use. I also have blogs other places, and blogger seems to be the most user-friendly. (Homeschoolblogger.com is, too. But that limits your audience pretty much to homeschoolers.)

And what should go on our website? I think you’ve written about this in the past. I know that I should have a place for people to sign up for a monthly newsletter (or weekly, however you want to do it). I know it should include a short bio, market your books, and have the blog. Anything else?

Randy sez: Yes, it’s perfectly OK to host your blog on Blogger and just link to it from your site. You will be giving up some traffic, but it’s not a crime. You can do anything you want, as long as it suits your purposes. As for what should go on your web site, you should decide early on what you want your web site to be about. It can be a small “brochure site” that is all about you. That won’t be very useful for marketing, but it will be the moral equivalent of a business card, and will give people a place to find out more about you, if they already know your name. Alternatively, if you have expertise in some particular topic, you can post some free information on your site, and it will act as a magnet to bring in people who never heard of you. This latter approach is a far more powerful marketing tool, but it’s also more work. You have to decide what’s right for you.

Lisa asked:

I have a website and a separate blog through WordPress. How difficult is it to host my blog with my website w/ a consistant design like your site?

Randy sez: Hosting your blog is not difficult. You just need to get some appropriate blogging software (we’ll discuss this soon). Then you need to change the look and feel of your blog so it matches your site. You can either pay a web designer to do this or do it yourself if you have the skills. (For my WordPress blog, I had to make some minor revisions to the WordPress PHP code and the CSS files. “PHP” is a programming language that creates HTML codes. “CSS” means “Cascading style sheets” and makes it easy to style your web site. Both of these take some serious work to learn, which is why it may be useful to hire somebody to do these revisions for you.) It took me about an hour to revise the WordPress files to look very similar to the rest of my site.

Lynda wrote:

What would a moderately priced web site cost?

Andrew answered:

The problem with answering it is that “moderately priced” is completely relative. You can spend anywhere from $100 to $10,000 and it would be considered moderately priced depending on the client. If you’d like to tell us what you want in a site, I can tell you approximately how much *I* would charge for designing it for you. I base my fees completely off the time I’ll spend on your site and that is generally $50 - $75 an hour depending on what kind of work it is; HTML encoding, actual server-side or client-side scripting or graphic design.

Randy sez: I would agree with Andrew that those prices are typical. A good web designer will ask you a series of questions up front to make sure they’re creating the kind of site you want and need. Questions like this:
1) What is the purpose of your site?
2) How much content do you want to put on it?
3) How often do you want to change the content?
4) Are you technically able to make changes yourself?
5) Do you want to do ecommerce on your site?
6) Do you want a simple design or something fancy and pretty?
7) Does your content need to be searchable, or is it OK to just be beautiful?
And many more . . .

Mary wrote:

For a site similar in scope to mine, prepare to spend between 3,000–6,000 bucks. It’s expensive, but well worth the cost in terms of looking professional.

Randy sez: Mary is a professional writer with a number of books published. For a writer at her level, this is a reasonable price for the beautiful site she’s got, along with the built-in ability to change content herself (she has a lot of Content Management System features on her site.) By the way, the link Mary gave in her comment didn’t work because it had a comma in it. The correct link is www.MaryDemuth.com. Check it out!)

Pamela wrote a word of warning:

I hired someone to do my web site (www.carouselcommunications.com), as I liked her company’s own site. I told her what I wanted, in the way of a new logo, color scheme, and pages. I wrote the content. She showed me a great design after one of her designers spent hours on it, gave me more than I expected, and I went with it. However, she did not tell me she was using Flash to create the site. She did this at her own choosing, which I didn’t know until after the site was finished.

I was unfamiliar with that program and didn’t know until after I gave the OK that Flash doesn’t allow for making easy changes and other things I wanted done. It was too late to go back and start over, so I kept what she’d designed. I now feel like my hands are tied with making changes (I have to pay her to do it), and she also says that “she” owns the web site, that I don’t. All information I didn’t know up front. I am hoping we can eventually come to some agreement, as I want to take over control of the site.

So BEWARE in hiring others to do your web site. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m saying, ask a lot of questions and be clear about everything you want and expect, up front.

Randy sez: This makes me ANGRY when I hear this. A web designer should ask questions before they build a site. Pamela has a gorgeous site. Check it out! But she can’t make changes to it. It’s written in Flash, and by the way, my understanding is that Flash is not searchable by search engines. That makes it almost useless to a writer. You want the search engines to be able to read the content on your site. Otherwise, they’ll never send anyone to your site, because they won’t know what’s on it. I just did a search on Google for “Pamela Cosel” and didn’t see her site in the first three pages of results. (I did see several pages on MY web site that mention her, because she comments on this blog sometimes.)

I have no idea what kind of recourse Pamela has, but this kind of thing happens quite often. I have no idea what the web designer means when she says she “owns” Pamela’s site, but I can’t imagine that she owns the domain. Pamela should own that. The web designer might own the presentation of the content, but that’s probably the extent of it. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know for sure.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about that pesky blogging software. There are several options, but I’m not terribly familiar with any of them except WordPress. So I’ll be interested to hear from those of you who use other software. You can post a comment here to tell us what you’re using.

We’re in the middle of a series on blogging, starting from the very beginning. So far, we’ve talked about:
1) Why it’s good to put the blog on your own domain, not somebody else’s.
2) How you register a domain.
3) What it means to “host” a web site.

Today, we’ll talk about how to actually get pages onto your web site, once you’ve found a place to host it. Again, this discussion is very elementary, so those of you who are knowledgeable may want to skim this or just wait till tomorrow.

In order to put pages on your site, you have to do several things:
1) Create the pages on your computer (or on the computer of your web master).
2) Transfer them to the computer (the “server”) where they’ll be hosted.

I’ll talk about #1 today, because you have a LOT of options, and no option is right for everybody. Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the issue of how to transfer your pages to your server.

Many people don’t know this, but you can put simple text files on your web site and they’ll work just fine. Want proof? Take a look at this page. It’s the most recent issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

If you click that link, your web browser will show you a page of straight and simple text. I created it in a text editor named TextWrangler which is free on the Mac and is one of the best text editors out there anywhere. On Windows, you can use a program like NotePad to produce text files, although NotePad is clunky and primitive. I’m sure there are great text editors out there for Windows, but I don’t know what’s available.

The important thing for our purposes is that it’s possible to create pages on the web without knowing any of those fancy codes. Of course, you won’t have any pictures or pretty fonts or nice formatting. You’ll just have text. But sometimes that’s all you need. That’s all I need for my archive of e-zines. If that’s all you need, then you don’t need fancy software to write your web pages.

Now, OF COURSE, you’ll usually want more than that. Text is text is text is BORING.

You’ll want pretty fonts. You’ll want nice page layouts. You’ll want forms, pictures, sound, movies, and maybe even dancing girls. You can get all of those, but in order to do so, you need to learn the codes for them. The name for these codes is “HyperText Markup Language.” This usually gets abbreviated as “HTML.”

Let’s unpack that a little. The “HyperText” part means that pages are linked together, and you can move between them by clicking on the links. A “Markup Language” is a set of codes that lets you put in all those fancy things, using nothing more than a text editor. That’s right. You can create any web page using just a simple text editor, IF YOU KNOW THE RIGHT CODES.

The problem is that those codes can get fairly complicated. But the nice thing is that, in principle, they are human readable. They’re just text. If you want to see an example of what they look like, click on the “View” menu on your web browser. You’ll see a bunch of menu items, and one of them will have the word “Source” in it. (Different browsers name this different things. On my browser, it’s called “View Source.”) If you select that menu, a new window will pop up on your screen showing a bunch of strange looking text. That is the HTML code for this web page. Notice that, even though the codes look very strange, they are all text. You could have typed all that in, if you knew how.

Most people don’t actually type in their HTML code directly. Most people use software to do it. There are many programs to create HTML pages. I use DreamWeaver, which runs on both Macs and PCs and is quite expensive. DreamWeaver is available at this web site. Many people like FrontPage, a mid-priced Windows-only program created by Microsoft. I used to use Freeway on the Mac, which is also mid-priced. There are also free programs, such as NVu, which runs on both Macs and PCs and is quite good. You can get NVu here.

So you can find software to help you come up with the codes. But there’s another problem. Even if you know all the codes, you still might not be good at graphic design. And modern web sites are expected to be “pretty.” They should have nice graphics and a pleasing layout. If you aren’t any good at graphic design, then your site is going to look ugly.

What’s an author to do? Personally, I don’t want a site that’s fancy. I have my reasons, but mainly they boil down to simplicity and the need to be able to make changes rapidly. So I hired a graphic designer to create a look for my site. She sent me an image showing how the site would be laid out and what colors and fonts to use. I did the rest. I wrote the HTML code to make the site look the way my designer designed it. If I want to change the design later, I can hire a new designer to give me new graphics and a new layout, and I can quickly rebuild the site. That’s my solution to the design problem.

Your solution may very well be different. A lot of authors don’t want anything to do with those pesky HTML codes. They want to hire somebody to do it for them. That’s a valid solution. It costs more, and it means that you can’t easily make changes, but it’s a valid solution and it may be right for you.

The problem with that solution is that you probably want to make changes to your site. You may want to make changes every single day, as you add new articles. What you’d really like to do is to hire a graphic designer to make you a pretty site that you can easily add articles to. Wouldn’t that be cool? Yes, very cool. That kind of site is called a “content management system” because it lets you manage the content yourself. The most common kind of content management system is a blog.

This is why I believe blogs are great for writers. You can hire somebody to set it up once. Then it’s programmed to let you add new stuff to it whenever you want.

By the way, take a look at the right margin of this page. About midway down that column, you’ll see a header that says “Pages”. That’s the beginning of a section that contains links to articles. If you wanted, you could have 20 or 30 or 100 articles there. I have only three. The important thing for you to know is that I added those using the blogging software. I didn’t have to write any HTML codes for those pages. I did it all from my blog.

So the moral of this story is that you can have a web site that is nothing more than a blog, and that might very well be all you need. Or possibly, it might be 90% of what you need, and you can hire a web designer to do a few other pages for you (such as one page for each of your books). As an example of a web site that is “just a blog” with nothing else, check out James Brausch’s site. James is a leading internet marketer (you’ll see that I copy some of the aspects of his site, because he’s thought hard about how a blog should work, and I follow his lead.)

If you need to find a web designer, how do you go about it? Here’s a simple procedure that will lead you to a web designer who will do a great job that you love at a price you can afford:
1) Look at the web sites of other authors and make a list of the ones that you really love.
2) Send an email to the authors on your list asking them who their web designer is and how much their site cost. Authors are usually willing to tell who their webmaster is and will tell you all the webmaster’s flaws and virtues. They will often also tell how much the site cost, though they sometimes don’t want to admit how much they paid. If they got a real bargain, they’ll be happy to tell.
3) Make a list of the webmasters and sort it by how expensive they are, from cheapest to most expensive.
4) Contact the cheapest webmaster on the list and ask for an estimate for your site.

If you follow this procedure, you’ll only be talking to webmasters who have successfully done a site similar to what you want, and you’ll get the best price.

It’s a good idea to know what you want in your site before you contact a webmaster. Do you want a traditional “brochure site” that shows off your books? (This is not very effective for marketing yourself.) Do you want just a blog? (This should be quite inexpensive.) Do you want some combination of the two? (This might be your best bet.) Do you want a “pretty” site that’s weighed down with tons of slow-loading graphics, or even worse, a Flash page that loads slowly and annoys site visitors? (This is generally your worst bet for marketing purposes and is often very expensive. Strangely enough, many authors choose this option.)

If you have a webmaster design and create your site, then they’ll take care of putting it on your server. If you build it yourself (with or without a webmaster’s design help) you’ll need to know how to transfer it from your computer to the server. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

We’re in the middle of a discussion on blogging for writers. In previous days, I’ve talked about the importance of putting your blog on your own domain and how to get a domain. We also took a few days to brainstorm up some ideas for the name Gerhi should write under. Looks like Debbie Thorkildsen is the winner. Debbie, email me privately with a Word document containing a page of your novel, and I’ll critique it.

OK, on to web site hosting. How do you do it?

I realize that with a title like today’s, I am in for a storm of comment spam from every hosting company in the world. I think my spam filter is up to it, but if not, I’ll delete any pesky posts that get through.

In order to put a blog on your web site, you need to have two things:
1) A web site
2) Blogging software

You have a ton of options for each of these. Today we’ll talk about how to get a web site. This may take a few days, but once we get through that, we’ll talk about blogging software.

So how do you get a web site?

A web site needs to be “hosted” somewhere. That just means that the files for your web site have to exist on some computer somewhere in the world, and then you need to inform the internet authorities of where that is.

A little techie talk is in order, and I’ll dumb it down to the level that I understand it: Every computer in the world that’s connected to the internet has something called an “IP address.” Computers on the internet can talk to each other if they each know the other’s IP address. An IP address is typically 4 numbers separated by periods. Something like this is a valid IP address: 192.24.18.255. Each of the four numbers needs to be between 0 and 255.

Humans, however, don’t like IP addresses. They’re hard to remember and boring. Humans prefer to work with addresses that contain words. So the web works by having a giant “phone book” that converts human-readable addresses such as “www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com” into computer-lovable IP addresses.

We talked a few days ago about the fact that you have to “register your domain” with a registration service (such as GoDaddy or one of the many others). When you do that, the registration service inserts your human-readable address into the “phone book” along with the IP address of the computer where your web site lives. The registrar then passes that information all around the world so that all the internet service providers can get the translation information. Once that’s done, anybody with a web browser can get to your web site.

Here’s roughly how the process works when you want to look at a web page:
1) You type in a domain name (such as “www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com”) into your web browser.
2) The web browser sends that domain name to the Internet Service Provider (ISP).
3) The ISP looks in the “phone book” and finds the IP address corresponding to the domain.
4) The ISP transmits the request for the web site to the appropriate computer on the internet (called the “web site server”) that holds that web site.
5) The web site server sends the requested page back to the ISP which forwards it to your web browser.
6) Your web browser translates that page into words and pictures and displays them on your screen.

There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and I’m sure it’s more complicated that this, but that’s very approximately what happens.

When you “host a site,” you need to put the files for the site on some particular web site server and then inform your registrar of the IP address for that server.

In principle, you could do this yourself, but most people choose to pay a small fee to somebody else to do it for them. I use GoDaddy to do this, since they are inexpensive and have not given me much trouble. (GoDaddy handles BOTH domain registration AND web hosting, as well as many other services.) There are many hosting services, and you can scout around to see which is best for you.

So the first step in hosting a web site is to identify a web hosting service and sign up with them. In my next post, I’ll talk about what happens next–putting the web site on the web site server.

Um, I don’t know yet. Yesterday, I announced a contest to help Gerhi figure out what name he should write under. Gerhi gets to decide who won (or he can decide that none of the answers works for him). Gerhi, let me know your decision via email, or post a comment here, as you like. The winner gets a free one-page critique from me.

We had a lot of comments today, so I’m going to be brief in this post, so as to let everyone have time to read all the comments. There were many ideas, and I’m not sure which was the best. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Tomorrow, we’ll move on to the topic that I’ve delayed for a couple of days — how to host your web site. There are LOT of options here, so it might take a few days to work through them all. And some of you will find this discussion elementary. Yes, it is, but it’s necessary so everyone will be up to speed. Soon enough, we’ll move on from there to a discussion of how to put your blog on your web site and then we’ll talk about the actual art of blogging.

All right folks, a question popped up today that is worth taking a day or two to discuss. Namely: what name do you write under?

That’s not so tough if your name is Stephen King, (as long as you’re THE Stephen King. If you’re not, considering becoming a plumber.) But if your name is unusual, you have to ask whether it’s an asset or a liability.

Along those lines, Gerhi posted the following question today:

My name, as I use it now, is “Gerhi Janse van Vuuren”. Shortened first name (unique) and three parts to the surname. I can never see myself doing a full name authoring which would be “Gerhardus Petrus Benjamin Janse van Vuuren”. Just using my initials GPB in front of Janse van Vuuren or GJ in front of van Vuuren also doesn’t want to fly.

Just using my own names I can work out quite a number of pseudonyms but I would like to write as me.

Problems: Very few English speakers can pronounce my name correctly. It is with a hard ‘G’ and a flat ‘e’.
People often think I’m female, I’m not.
I could go with “Gerhard” but will I lose the uniqueness. The same with “Gary” or “Gerald”. In fact, I could never see myself as a “Gary”.

Edgar Rice Burroughs made a triple name work but I’ve got four parts. I’ll never be Stephen King.

So, should I just be me or should I work up another name? I’m not even asking what I should register as a domain, just, what should I use as my author name?

Randy sez: I’m going to assume you are planning to publish in English. You have a bunch of options, each with advantages and disadvantages.

1) Gerhi Janse van Vuuren. Advantages: It’s your real name, so your obnoxious third grade teacher who said you’d never amount to anything will KNOW she was wrong when you get famous. Disadvantages: It’s quite a long name; 3 of the 4 parts of it will be badly mispronounced by most English speakers; it’s your real name, so the stalkers will have an easier time tracking you down.

2) Gerhi van Vuuren. Advantages: It’s still your real name. Disadvantages: 2 of the 3 parts are still going to be massacred by English speakers.

3) G.P. van Vuuren. Advantages: It’s short, and relatively easy to remember because now all the hard parts are focused in the last name; 2 leading initials makes you sound like a British author in the same league as T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, and numerous others. Disadvantages: It loses your first name.

4) Anglicize it to something like Gary van Buren. Advantages: Easy to pronounce. Disadvantages: It’s lost the Dutch connection and now sounds like you’re one of the billions of American writers.

5) Choose a pen name not related to your real name. Advantages and Disadvantages are the same as #4.

This is a hard problem, and I don’t know how to advise you. So let’s have a contest! My blog readers are among the brightest folks in the galaxy, so one of them is sure to have a good answer.

Blog readers: post a suggestion for Gerhi as a comment. He gets to choose who gave the best answer. The winner gets a free critique from me of one page of their current work in progress.

Now I’ll answer a couple of other questions. Kristi has decided to move her blog from Blogspot.com to a real web site:

Maybe I can leave the blogspot site up, with a final posting that says the blog has moved and give a link to my domain/blog page?

If you have your blog on your website page, how do you get the comments function (like this one) to display?

Randy sez: Yes on question #1. For question #2: comments are allowed in most blogging software. I use WordPress for this blog, and comments are easy to set up in the admin section of the blog.

Sylvia wrote:

I have neither a blog nor a website. A friend developed a ministry website, but she now finds that the search engines are not picking it up. She’s encouraging me to develop a website, but since mine would be for ministry, too, I’m not eager to become involved until we can solve the search engine problem.
My friend was advised to have her website designed by a professional. However, we are both retired and on a fixed income, so the financial angle concerns us. Can you give me a ballpark figure for how much it would be to have a professional format a website? Any recommendations? We live in a Portland, Oregon suburb not too far from you, so I’m hoping that you will know someone to give us some professional help –if we can afford it.

Randy sez: We’ll talk about the search engines in due course. The Simpleology course on blogging contains some helpful basic advice on getting traffic to your blog.

As for the cost of a professionally designed web site, that ranges from a few hundred to zillions of dollars, depending on how fancy you want it. The first question one should always ask before creating a web site or a blog is: What is the purpose of this web site (or blog)? The answer to that question will determine how much time, energy, and money you should sink into it. Those are the only resources you have personally available to you–time, energy, and money. Since you have finite amounts of each, you need to think carefully about how you want to allocate them. If a web site or blog is going to consume more of your precious resources than it’s worth, then don’t do it! There are plenty of other things to do in life.

If you have a suggestion for Gerhi, post it as a comment now!

Today I’d like to catch up a bit on some of the questions that have come in on web domains and web hosting:

Kristi wrote:

Question: if we already have a blog that is different in name from our personal/professional website name, should we change it? Or just add/move the blog to a link on our own website, like Jane Yolen does at www.JaneYolen.com where she has a journal page?

Randy sez: It’s up to you. I strongly recommend that you have your blog on YOUR site, not on somebody else’s, but you’re not going to get roughed up by the Blog Police if you don’t. A lot depends on how much traffic you expect your blog to bring in. Mine brings a lot of traffic, so I want it coming to my site.

D’Ann Mateer wrote:

Here’s a question about domain names that I’ve wondered about for a couple of years and its kept me from registering one:

My first name has an apostrophe in it which, obviously, can’t be used in the domain name. Which would seem more logical for people to find me: to use my name without the apostrophe or to use initials in front of my last name?

I’ve always liked that my name was different for name ID among readers, but I don’t want to confuse readers when they look for me on the web. (Of course, this is someday, when I’m published!)

Any insight or advice on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

Randy sez: Well, D’Ann, I’ve often wondered what you do for your web domain, given your apostrophed name. I don’t know the best solution, but here are several options:
1) Use www.DAnnMateer.com as your domain.
2) Use www.DAMateer.com as your domain.
3) Get both domains, and have one of them point to the other.
4) Change your name to Dave.

I would suggest Door #3. That way you get the best of both worlds. “DAMateer.com” would work on the radio, although you’d have to spell “Mateer”.

Whatever you do, I would suggest you do it quickly. It really doesn’t cost much to register a domain, and then you know that you’ve got it forever, as long as you pay your fees every year. If somebody else registers DAMateer.com before you get it, you’ll be kicking yourself forever.

There were some comments on the relative merits of DreamHost.com for hosting a site. I have nothing to add to this discussion, though I did read the article by one disaffected user of DreamHost, and it looked rather bad. I have had good service and good phone support with GoDaddy. They called me at home once, and one of my daughters answered the phone. She was very confused about why GoDaddy was asking for Daddy.

Yvette asked:

I have a ministry website, ministry blog and writers blog.

I have been thinking of merging the ministry website and blog into one and keeping the writing blog separate.

I have go daddy, and will be switching over to them for my blogs. I understand they can support wordpress themes. I don’t like the go daddy themes.

Would it be safe to have one website/blog with perhaps a separate blog for writing?

Randy sez: Yes, it’s quite safe and probably a better idea than having the web site and blog separated, if they’re really about the same thing.

Tomorrow, we’ll pick up with some more web site basics. After you’ve registered your domain, then what? See ya tomorrow with the answer.

A lot of great questions and comments have been stacking up over the last few days. I will get to as many of them as possible in the next week or so. For today, I want to talk about some of the basic issues, because I can see from recent questions that some of my loyal readers need some explanations.

The first basic concept I want to cover is the concept of domains. For some of you, this will be utterly elementary, but let’s get everyone up to speed.

I believe it’s critical for any writer to own a domain name that is as close as possible to the name they write under. What’s a “domain?” Look at the top of your browser. This blog lives at www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/blog. My domain is “AdvancedFictionWriting.com”. That is the domain for my web site on “how to write fiction.”

By the way, I also have another domain at “Ingermanson.com” which is the web site about my fiction writing. My first two initials are “R.S.” so I used to have a domain at “RSIngermanson.com” but after many radio interviews in which I had to repeat that middle initial (because “S” and “F” sound alike on the radio), I realized that I needed to simplify it as much as possible.

You may ask, “Why not use RandyIngermanson.com or RandallIngermanson.com?” That’s a good question. In fact, I do own those domains. I have things set up so if you try either of those, your browser takes you to Ingermanson.com. I can do this because there are very few Ingermansons in the world, and I am the only Randy. But most people would want to register a first-name/last-name combination, such as “CamyTang.com” or “BrandilynCollins.com” or “ReneGutteridge.com”.

As I said above, I strongly believe that every writer should own a domain that is identical or close to the name they write under. If your real name is “Samuel Clemens” but your pen name is “Mark Twain”, then you should own “MarkTwain.com”. This isn’t always possible. As some of you have noted, sometimes another author has the same name or nearly the same name as you do. I have an author friend who has the same name as a porn star, and unfortunately, Miss Porno grabbed the domain name first. So grab your domain now, if you can!

How do you do that and how much does it cost? You can buy domain names at many “domain registration” web sites, such as GoDaddy. When you “register a domain,” you are paying a small fee (usually less than $10 per year) for the exclusive rights to a given domain for a fixed period of time. Registering a domain is very easy and costs very little, so you should do this, even if you don’t plan to put up a web site right away. It’s best to own your name!

That raises another question, which Joanna asked:

Hi Randy, thanks for all the helpful information (and the quirky humour). And thanks for putting your blog through FeedBlitz because if I don’t get an email notification I don’t remember to check the website. I’m curious about FeedBlitz and other options where blog readers can sign up for notification. I’m also curious about privacy. I haven’t set up a blog yet (still identifying who I’m writing to and why) so I don’t know how much personal information one has to give out. Could you talk a bit about that, and the same for registering web addresses? I’m a happy Canadian, but if I register a .ca name I have to let my name, phone number and address be listed in the host’s “WhoIs” section for all to see. This is changing in a few months, and I’m waiting for that. Do .com addresses have the same issue? I want to set up both. Call me paranoid, but if I’m blogging and anyone in the world can read it, odds are there might be someone out there I might rather not hear from. (And if you do call me paranoid, it’s thanks to your e-zine a few years ago when you pointed out that it’s too late to protect one’s privacy once it’s become necessary.)

Randy sez: When you register your domain, you can also pay another small fee to have it registered “privately”. GoDaddy charges less than $10 per year for this service, and I do this with all my domains.

The reason is simple: When you register a domain, you have to give contact information so that you can be reached. Anyone can get that contact information, which includes your address, email, and phone number. If you value your privacy (and you should–see the article I wrote on this about a year and a half ago on my e-zine) you should guard this information–especially your home address. There are too many weirdos in this world. You don’t want them to knock on your door at 2 AM to invite themselves in for coffee. (Hannibal Lecter might invite himself in for liver and fava beans and a nice Chianti.)

When you pay for “private registration,” you are paying somebody else (a “proxy”) to provide that address, email, and phone number. If somebody needs to reach you, they contact that “proxy” who will then forward the message to you. This is very much safer, and I recommend paying the extra money.

Bottom line: Register your own name as your domain, and do it as soon as possible. Pay for the private registration option. This should not cost you more than $20 per year.

In my next blog, I’ll talk about the next step in the web site development process, which is “hosting a site.” See ya then!

I’ve done a couple of days of tips on blogging, and today I’ll take a short hiatus to discuss some of the comments that have come up.

I noticed that Marcus, over at GoodWordEditing, posted a blog entry today titled “I’m not a Brand, and Neither is My Blog.” Marcus makes some excellent points, and I’ll refer you to his post to read those. Let me be the first to say that not everybody should be using their blog as a commercial venture. Blogs started out life as web diaries. Some of them morphed eventually into businesses, but that doesn’t mean every blogger should be trying to turn a buck. Most people play baseball for fun. A few play it for money. Either choice is OK, so long as you are not fooling yourself that you are doing it for Reason #2 when you are really doing it for Reason #1.

This is a problem I’m seeing with publishing houses these days. They tell their authors to blog in order to market their fiction. But they give them little guidance in how to do that effectively. I don’t know of any novelists right now who are blogging effectively. I’m sure there are some, so you should understand that I’m merely stating my ignorance here. I know of some successful novelists who are blogging, but that is not the same thing. Which came first, the blog or the success? In many cases, it’s the success. My readers will no doubt point me to effective bloggers, and then I won’t be ignorant anymore. (Post a comment here if you know of a successful novelist who is successful BECAUSE of the blogging. I have no doubt that it’s been done.)

Tom had some very good comments on how to get radio interviews. His comments are too long to repost here, but just check the comments for my post from yesterday. Tom is an announcer on a NYC radio show, so he knows what he’s talking about. My own radio interviews have always been lined up by publicists, so I have no direct experience setting them up myself.

Donna posted a comment yesterday that I want to discuss. It’s quite long, but it raises some important issues:

I did want to mention a few downsides of blogging on your own site just so those not used to ‘owning’ your own site will know what to expect. One is about the hosting. I haven’t used a free site in years but from what I remember, free sites are limited on what you can do on them, which could make it impossible to add in applications such as blog and message board programs. The best way is to go with paid hosting. Then you have to pay to register your domain name to point to it. Third is that bringing in a lot of traffic to your site runs up your bandwith, which I’m sure Randy can agree with. Hosting allows a certain amount of bandwidth to be used that is covered in the cost but if you exceed that amount for a month they most often will shut your site down, either until the beginning of the next month or until you pay extra to cover it. And lastly, which is what I really hate, is that the higher you get in the search engines, the more spammers you get hitting your site. Trust me, they love to post their ads, many obscene, on message boards, guest books and blogs. So, this means making sure to have secure scripts running and know how to set preferences to keep their posts from showing until approved. The net is a great place but….

Randy sez: I would agree that if you are going to host a blog on your own web site (which I recommend doing) you should host it on a paid site. It is dirt cheap these days to get a site hosted with mammoth amounts of memory and plenty of bandwidth. A free hosted site is generally going to have ads, and those make you look like a cheapskate. Pay the few bucks per month to host it. GoDaddy charges less than $4 per month for hosting. There are many others that are comparable. I’ve never had problems with using too much bandwidth. GoDaddy’s cheapest hosting offers 250 GB of data transfer per month. Last week, my site transferred 1.9 GB of data. For all of December, I transferred less than 9 GB.

Spam, of course, is an issue. The WordPress blogging software has an excellent spam filtering plugin called Akismet. My policies on this site are fairly tight. All first-time comments are moderated. All comments containing a link are moderated. I use the generic set of “no-no” words that Akismet came with. Posts that contain “no-no” words are considered spam. My spam filter has caught many thousands of spam messages and has never allowed a true spam to get through. It has marked a few legitimate comments as spam, and I have rescued them all.

I allow comments that make personal attacks on me, but no personal attacks on my blog readers are allowed. In one case last year, I removed a series of comments that made personal attacks on me after a few days because I concluded that they were thinly disguised commercials, and I didn’t care to provide free advertising for this person. By the time I removed the comments, my loyal blog readers had made it clear to the offender that they liked me a lot better than him. (Thanks, folks!) I believe in free speech, so attacks on me don’t much bother me. But I have to approve all commercials on this blog.

Heather wrote:

Sidenote: I’ve been on your newsletter list for a while and noticed the other day that I haven’t received one in a few months. I check Spam daily, so it hasn’t gotten caught up in that. Would you suggest signing up again?

Randy sez: My hunch is that your ISP is filtering my e-zines. ISPs can do this without your knowledge or permission. I can see from my delivery reports that certain ISPs have been filtering my e-zines lately, and there’s little I can do about it. I archive all issues on this site in the E-zine section, and I announce each issue on this blog. That’s about all I can do.

Sylvia asked:

Would you advise starting with a website or a blog? I have neither. Will a blog on a free blog site be picked up by a search engine, or only a website? Sorry, but I know NOTHING about the internet — only how to ask a question.

Randy sez: I would get a website with my name as the domain and then put a blog there. You might want to start small by first just reserving your domain. (I’ll talk about this tomorrow, since it clearly needs to be addressed.)

Several other readers asked about how to attract traffic to a blog. This is an Xtremely important question and I’ll have a lot to say on this next week. But first things first. Tomorrow, we’ll back up and talk about some of the annoying administrative things you need to do to get a domain and host your site. See ya then!

Wow, a lot of LONG comments today! I will get to all of them eventually, but not today.

Today, I’d like to talk about branding your blog. This is critical, because people need to know what your blog is “about” or they’ll find a reason to visit one of the other 60 million blogs and skip yours.

This blog has a pretty simple brand. It’s the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, and it’s about fiction writing. But there are plenty of blogs about fiction writing. What’s different about mine? Several things:

First, it’s well integrated in with my web site, which already had a strong brand as a quirky, high-content site with a sharp focus on “how-to”. The look and feel is almost identical. Gerhi noticed this today and asked the obvious question:

One question for you Randy. Your blog and site match in design. Obviously its not a standard Wordpress theme. Who made up your template for the WordPress side of your site?

Randy sez: I took the default WordPress theme and modified it by going into the PHP code and editing it directly to look as much like my own site as possible. This is easy if you are familiar with the usual suspects: HTML, PHP, and CSS. If you aren’t, you can always pay somebody to do it. It took me about an hour to tweak things the way I wanted them, starting from a cold start with the default WordPress theme. That was because I had already created the template for my web site first. (Gerhi asked if Arteculation Designs did that for me. The answer is no. They created the graphic design and sent me an image file, with color codes for all the colors, and the names of the fonts. Then I turned that into HTML, PHP, and CSS. I like this kind of geek-work.)

Second, near the top of the blog is my “success formula,” (which is on almost every page of my site). This formula is:

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I developed this “success formula” last summer because I realized that those three elements were the main categories that I’ve been teaching in the last year, and they are the main foundation of my own efforts as a writer. Everything I do falls into one of those categories. My e-zine has three major columns per month, each focusing on one of those topics.

Third, I resolutely resist all attempts by people to talk about anything else or get off track on nonfiction or politics or religion or even my own fiction. I get emails from people all the time who want to advertise on my site. I tell them that my policy is not to accept ads. I only recommend products that I have created myself and which I can feel proud of, or products that I use myself, or products that are very similar to ones I use myself.

Fourth, I have a particular style of writing. It’s quirky (even a little crazy at times) and sometimes opinionated. It’s me. I don’t claim it’s the best style. But it’s my style and it’s consistent. If I were ever to hire a ghostwriter to write my blogs (I can’t imagine doing that), it would be obvious to everyone right away, because my goofball style is hard to copy. The important thing is that it’s consistent. You know what you’re going to get. That’s an important part of branding. And it’s authentic. I don’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

Camille asked:

But to be very honest, there are tons of writing blogs that review books and interview authors, and while I’m interested in hearing and learning about them, there is a glut of the same info out there. I don’t want to glut, so I’ll keep marinading until I come up with that special something that will make a must read for someone besides my mother.

I think it is a mistake for a novelist to write a blog about “fiction writing” or “author interviews” if your goal is to promote your novels. You will note that I almost never blog about my fiction. The reason is simple. The purpose of this blog is NOT to promote my fiction. (I will have a different blog for that when the time is right.) The purpose of this blog is to promote myself as a teacher of “how to write fiction.” This makes sense for me because I do a lot of teaching. For several years, I’ve routinely taught at 4, 5, or 6 conferences per year. And for the last three years, I’ve had various teaching products for sale. This blog helps me with that business, because it draws traffic. (The more traffic, the more sales.) And this blog gives me a great chance to interact directly with you, my loyal blog readers. I listen to you, and that tells me what I should be teaching about, what products I should be creating. Finally, this blog gives me a chance to hang out with writers that I may never meet in person, because some of you are a long way off. Writers are fun people.

Andie asked:

What content can an author blog or write about that would really sell potential readers of one’s fiction books?

This problem has consumed my thinking for ~six months.

Not to put Randy on the spot, but I wonder what the conversion rate of readers of Randy’s blog (RORBs) or non-fiction products buy his fiction?

Not that there should be any percentage as Randy’s blog/website are not setup to do this converting but how would one go about getting non-fiction writing to sell one’s fiction books?

Randy sez: I don’t know how many of the readers of this blog buy my fiction. I know that some do, because I sometimes get emails from folks who found this web site and wound up buying my novels. But that was never the purpose of this site, and it would not bother me if the conversion rate were zero.

But the question remains: How can a novelist use a blog to help sell his fiction? The answer is, I believe, that you use a blog the exact same way you use ordinary publicity to sell your fiction. The only difference is that you are in control of your blog, while you are not in control of the usual publicity channels (TV, radio, newspaper feature articles, magazine feature articles). If you’ve ever worked with a publicist, you’ll know that they try very hard to get you on radio interviews. (You can do a radio interview over the phone at home in your pajamas. I did one once where I had been asleep until 90 seconds before the interview–one of those scheduling surprises that you learn to live with.)

And how do you get on radio? You figure out a way to connect your novel to one of the following:
1) Current events
2) Topics of general interest
3) Topics of special interest to certain groups

Then you approach radio station programming directors and pitch them with an idea. A few years ago, I wrote a suspense novel (DOUBLE VISION) in which quantum encryption played a major role. My publicist got me some radio interviews in which the “hook” was identity theft. So I’d go on a radio show, answer some questions on ID theft and what you can do to protect yourself, and then the host would ask about my book.

Publicity is publicity. If your book is “about” something, then you can blog about it, probably indefinitely.

Is your book “about” something? I’ll bet it is. Romance novels are “about” relationships, and dating, and love, the meaning of life, and a zillion other things. Suspense novels are “about” legal issues or politics or big science run amok or military hardware or a zillion other things. Fantasy novels are “about” the endless battle between Good and Evil or the human need to go on a quest or the longing for medieval chivalry or a zillion other things.

Your mission as a publicity-hungry novelist is to FIND A WAY to connect your fiction to the NONFICTION topic that your novel is “about”. Then you can talk about that forever.

A personal note to show you that I “eat my own dog food” on this issue: I am working on a novel now set in ancient Jerusalem during the first century. The series I envision is “about” Jesus in his social/political/economic/religious setting. It is “about” the history of Jewish people in a cataclysmic time. It is “about” archaeology, cultural anthropology, religion, and much more. It is “about” how we in the 21st century can read and understand a set of documents (the New Testament) that was written for people we barely understand, and how that set of documents might be relevant (or irrelevant) to our life today. It’s about a zillion other things. When I launch my blog, it will be “about” all those (nonfiction) topics. Some folks will be interested (they’ll find me via the search engines) and many more people will NOT be interested. All that matters is that my natural audience will find me. Those are the only people that I can effectively market my books to. The purpose of my blog will be to help those people find me long before my next book comes out.

To summarize: Branding is about making a promise of consistent quality. Your blog does that by defining itself sharply and then delivering consistently. You’re a writer! You have something to say! Make that the focus of your blog, and you will draw all the readers that you deserve.