Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We’ve been on a fun break from the heavy stuff for a couple of days, and yesterday I asked what nonfiction you all are reading. I can’t comment on all your comments, so I’ll take a few at random:

Christophe wrote:

“The C++ Programming Language” by Bjarne Stroustrup. I’ve actually gone through it a couple of times already, and I don’t think it qualifies as “reading”

Somehow, I get the feeling that’s not the kind of non-fiction book that you meant, Randy

Randy sez: No, that’s exactly what I meant. I was interested to hear what other interests you all have besides fiction, because that will inevitably find its way into your fiction. I’ve never read Stroustrup (it’s a classic) but I have several other books on C++, some of which I’ve read cover-to-cover a couple of times. I’m more of a fan of Java than C++, so I sympathize with you on having to read Stroustrup. (For you non-programmers, Bjarne Stroustrup invented the C++ language, which is now a standard language, very widely used.)

Sonja wrote:

I’m reading James N Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Mystery. Does it count as non-fiction if it’s about writing fiction?

Randy sez: Yes, unless he’s lying. Frey’s book is excellent. I got a lot out of that one. Several of you are also reading Dwight Swain’s book, TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER. It’s interesting to me that people either love Swain or hate him. I don’t know why that is.

Melissa wrote:

Currently I’m reading “Cattle-Lords and Clansmen” by Nerys Patterson. It’s a bit on the dry side but contains much of the historical information on Ireland that I have been unable to find elsewhere in my research, so I have to give credit where credit is due.

Randy sez: I’m always amazed at the incredible lengths novelists will go to in order to do their research. This sounds like one of those books that only a novelist would read. I have a ton of books just like it.

Katie wrote:

I’m reading Stein on Writing - bits and pieces at a time so I can understand the advice and apply it instead of breezing through the book.

Randy sez: This is another classic. I took a mentoring workshop with Sol Stein back in 1994, and now whenever I read his book, I hear his voice as I read. Sol is one of the great writing teachers of the last 50 years or so. He was an award-winning playwright, edited something like 1600 books, and wrote some best-selling fiction. A truly amazing guy.

By the way, if any of you have WAY too much money on your hands and want to go to a truly luxurious writer’s retreat, take a look at Misque, which is extraordinarily expensive but looks amazingly spiffy. It’s in Hawaii and takes only 20 participants. I’ve never been there and will probably never go, but one of my loyal readers runs the blog for it and she pointed me to the Misque web site. If you sign up, tell ‘em I sent you. And send me pictures after it’s over — it sounds dazzling, based on what I saw at the web site.

I’m reading tonight through all the many comments my loyal blog readers left today on what they’re reading right now. I was up till 1:30 AM last night trying to finish DIES THE FIRE, but finally went to bed because I had to get some tax work done today with my accountant, and I thought it would be a little uncouth to fall asleep while looking at Form 1040. That would be very uncool. I did finish the book today, and I gather there’s a sequel or two, so I need to look for those.

I’m also rereading through the Harry Potter series, this time reading them aloud to my kids. That’s an old family tradition with us, reading out loud. They’re way past the age when they need to be read aloud to, but we all still like it.

Mark said:

I am reading The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Set in the 1100’s, it’s an enthralling, one thousand page book about a boring subject: the building of a cathedral. In that sense alone, it’s a marvel. It took the author over three years to write it. It was a major departure from his spy novels. Many thought it was a risk to his career. But it is now considered his greatest work.

Randy sez: That’s one of my favorite books–it’s on my top five list (which actually has about 15 books on it, because some of them are series). The sequel, WORLD WITHOUT END, came out last year and I really enjoyed that one, although I thought it didn’t have quite the magic for me that the first one did. I can’t say exactly why. Certainly, it was a fascinating look at life in a medieval English town.

Karla wrote:

The most memorable one I’ve read lately is A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS by Khaled Hosseini. Wow. Can that man ever write. If you have never read KITE RUNNER (his first one) I highly recommend it. He is a beautiful writer.

Randy sez: Yes, I thought THE KITE RUNNER was terrific. I’ve been meaning to read A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, but there’s only so many hours in the day.

Joanna wrote:

Randy, the technology-gone book you’re reading sounds like the same sort of premise as Terri Blackstock’s Restoration series: Last Light, Night Light etc?

Randy sez: Terri’s book is named LAST LIGHT and is the beginning of a series. I think Terri got the idea at roughly the same idea as the author of DIES THE FIRE. She emailed me at the time and asked what could cause all the lights to go out all over the planet, and I suggested EMP (electromagnetic pulse) although I wasn’t sure if it could work planet-wide. So the way Terri wrote it was to leave it unexplained, and have some of her characters wonder whether it was EMP that caused it, but never really say for sure. And that’s pretty much how S.M. Stirling played it too. I’m pretty sure neither Terri nor Stirling have ever heard of each other — they got the idea independently, and their plots are very different. This actually happens quite often, and it’s one reason why “someone stealing your idea” is not a particularly big thing to worry about, although most beginning writers fret about it a lot. Ideas are all over the place, and different writers will develop them very differently. Now if somebody steals your words, you should take action, because that’s plagiarism. But ideas are free as the wind.

Sylvia wrote:

My daughter gave me The Splitting Storm by Rene Gutteridge. I assume that Rene is female, so it interests me that her protagonist is a male.

Randy sez: Yes, Rene is a friend of mine, so I can say with some confidence that she is very likely female. She’s done quite well with male protagonists. A little-known fact: Rene is about five feet tall, but she was an All-State basketball player in high school. She once went on a writing-conference cruise while five months pregnant and met an editor who was six feet tall. Naturally, Rene challenged him to a game of “Horse” (it’s a game where you attempt difficult shots with the basketball and if you make it, your opponent has to make the same shot or lose a point.) Of course, Rene won in a landslide and she has never let this editor forget it.

OK, my next question is: What nonfiction book are you reading right now? I’ll go first. I’m reading an e-book named “Google Analytics” which I bought off the web the other day. It’s a short book that gets into the “how-to” of making Google Analytics work. This is rather an odd choice for me. The last non-fiction book I read was “Collective Intelligence” which is all about how to do data-mining on the information that comes from people interacting with a web site, but it has many other uses too. This is a book only a math guy could love. I’m a math guy, so I read it twice. I thought it was really good.

The comments that many of my loyal blog readers have left on my blog today remind me that once in awhile, it’s good to take a little break. We’ve now wrapped up a long and quite intense discussion about web sites and blogging and all that techie stuff.

Let’s not forget why we write: Because we LOVE reading, and somehow or other, we all convinced ourselves that we could write something that we’d want to read. We and five billion other readers.

Right now, I’m reading a pretty cool book that I never heard of until a friend gave it to me a few weeks ago. He and his wife and son were staying with us for about a week while they looked around town, because they’re planning to move up here in a year or so. We had a lot of fun talking about lots of stuff, and he gave me a copy of one of his favorite books: DIES THE FIRE, by S.M. Stirling.

The premise of this book is that suddenly (for no clearly explained reason) all electrical systems fail, all explosives no longer explode, and the entire world is knocked back technologically to the early medieval period. Millions of people starve to death. Some turn to cannibalism. Others wander aimlessly, waiting to die or get eaten (hopefully in that order). But some of them organize into tribes for protection (or aggression) and begin primitive farming or hunting/gathering or marauding or whatever it takes to survive.

There are two main Good-Guy groups that the author alternates between–a hunter/gatherer group in Idaho led by a tough but fair ex-marine; and a farmer group mostly made up of Wiccans in Oregon, led by a Gaelic folk musician/witch. The city of Portland (right across the river from me) is taken over by an evil Bad Guy with fantasies of holding an empire built on tribute. Things are heading for a showdown between Good Guys and Bad Guys as I head into the final third of the book.

I’m finding it all extremely interesting. We do live in a pretty darn techie world. What if all that suddenly went away? What if we had no web? No (gasp) blogs? No streaming audio from www.Pandora.com to play us a mix of our favorite music over high-speed DSL? It would be a different world. Makes me want to go learn archery and shoot something. It’s making me think about the world in a different way, which is always good.

So let’s have a little fun for a few days. What are YOU reading right now? (Has to be fiction.) Do you like it? Why? Leave a comment and let’s compare notes.

A few final odds and ends tonight before we switch to a new topic tomorrow:

Pam wrote:

I have a quick question before we totally leave the website topic. How do you know which ending to use? For example: .com .net .info

My husband thought .info was best for my site because it’s not a commercial site.

Randy sez: I prefer the .com ending. I think .net is second best. The fact is that when people are trying to guess your web site, they’ll guess .com first and .net second. This is not such a problem as it used to be, because most people will just hit the search engines if they can’t find you on the first guess, and many of them will try Google before even guessing. But .com has a more professional feel to it than .net or .info or .name or .biz. I don’t know if it’ll always be that way, but for now, my advice is to grab a .com ending if you possibly can.

Christophe wrote:

Currently I’m immensely busy at the office. I come home and there’s tons of stuff to do before I can even sit down and take a moment. Then, tired from a hard days work, I like to just relax for a while and “space out” (I think the expression is). Then all of a sudden, it’s time to go to bed. Lately I find no time to write. How do I make this work? My fingers are aching, itching to go back to work, but I’m just too tired when I get home to focus.

Help me, Obi-Wan Randy. You’re my only hope.

Obi-Wan Randy sez: Welcome back, Christophe! We’ve missed you. I don’t have an easy answer. Sometimes, you’re just going to hit a stretch where “Life Happens” and you have less time to write. There is nothing you can do about this. Eventually, things will calm down a bit and you can write more.

The goal, of course, is to run your life as efficiently as possible, so you’ll have time to write. This is why I’ve made such an effort to manage my time better, and also my money. Time really is money. The more money you can earn with the same level of effort, the better, because then you can trade money for time.

At a certain point, I went to my boss at my former day job and asked for a 20% reduction in hours. Of course, that also meant a 20% reduction in money, but I was willing to pay that price. When I moved on to a different employer, I made it a condition going in that I’d only work at 80% of full time. Because I had worked hard to make myself a valuable employee, they were willing to do that. Eventually, I asked for another 20% reduction, and got that too.

There is a price to this writing life. The price is that you will almost certainly always be stretched thin, you will always have less free time, you will always have less money. That is grossly unfair, because we Great Artistes deserve better, but that is the fate the uncaring universe has dealt us.

On that happy note, let me point you all to my friend Chip MacGregor’s blog. Chip used to be my agent before he went over to the Dark Side (temporarily) and became a publisher. He’s now back agenting again, and he has a great blog at www.ChipMacgregor.com.

In the last couple of days, he posted some interesting data on the top-selling books from last year. There were only 4 books last year that sold more than a million copies. Another 15 books sold more than half a million copies. Chips sums it up by saying that there were 250,000 new books published last year, and only 19 of them hit the big time.

That may or may not depress the living heck out of you. But it’s reality. We need to be realists. This is a tough, tough career choice we’ve made. Hence the need to use our time well, be frugal with our money, and market the daylights out of our books.

Today is reserved for answering some of the questions that folks have on web sites and blogging.

Claire wrote:

Today I ran across Homestead. (www.homestead.com) Have you heard of them? They seem to suggest that using already formatted templates, they can help design a site with relative ease. Also, they only charge 5 dollars or something for hosting the site/ month. I remember you said these sites that charge little for hosting might not be ideal because they can’t redirect traffic if ever we want to change host. Is that right? I’d love your thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages to opting for something like Homestead. I’m pretty computer illiterate. I’m prepared to learn if it’s really necessary, but would prefer to spend the time writing and can’t afford to pay for someone to set up website at the moment.

Randy sez: This is a site-builder web site like I talked about yesterday. I’ve never heard of this particular one, so I checked it out just now. They have many nice looking templates for you to choose from. The first glitch came when I clicked the Try It Free button. It took me to a page that said, “Please Update Your Browser”. It turns out that Homestead doesn’t work with Safari (the most common web browser on the Mac). It does work with Firefox on the Mac, but it’s rather annoying to be told to update, when I have the latest version of Safari.

My hunch is that this site will work fine for creating a small site. I don’t know what its limitations are, but it appears to let you cheaply and easily build a site on your own domain. (That’s important — you want it on your own domain, not theirs.)

Claire notes that it costs $5 per month for hosting on Homestead and is concerned that this might be too cheap. Actually, this is more than it costs to host a site on GoDaddy, and GoDaddy will also give you far more space and allows you much more traffic per month. But it seems a fair price for getting a site right now, with little effort. The price for all that convenience is that the site will be pretty inflexible. You will likely not be able to get in and hack the code. Many people won’t care about that. It’s up to you to decide that question. If I’m not mistaken, GoDaddy (and other large hosting companies) provide various site-builder tools, so you might want to check those out.

Claire also wants to make sure that she could move her site to a different host later if she wanted to. Yes, so long as they give you ownership of the domain (I can’t tell if they do, but I assume so), then you could in principle move the site elsewhere. But you might have to rebuild it from scratch there, because it’s not clear if Homestead gives you access to the HTML code that defines your site. I can’t tell from their description.

Is this for you? Could be. You can certainly do many things quickly, easily, and cheaply. If those are part of your requirements, then it might be right for you. It would be wise to find somebody who uses this site who is very knowledgeable about web development. (This might be hard, because very knowledgeable people would probably rather build their own site than use something with so many limitations.) I have no experience with this site-builder tool. Do any of my blog readers have experience with it?

Charlotte asked:

I notice that most of the blogs I read regularly have a basically white page with mostly black writing, very clean and plain.

Has anyone done any testing or have any experience with the more “designed” blog templates–still with readable black text on white background, but with side colors, graphics, etc? I know this is back to the “pretty” question, but has anyone seen any different results?

I also wonder about the effectiveness of larger graphics at the top, and wonder if they could be put in other places, so that more of the text is on the first screen (above the fold as it were).

Randy sez: Black on white will always look good and be readable. I personally hate blogs that have a muted colored font on a muted colored background in a small type size. If it also has flashing banners in the margin or top, that is grounds for calling my friend Vinnie the Kneecap-Remover.

In my view, side colors and graphics are fine and neither add nor detract from the usability of the site, if the colors give enough contrast for the text to be readable. Graphics are good, if they’re not garish. Top banner graphics are very common, and provide a powerful branding element if you use the same graphic on every page of the site. I feel that a top graphic that is 150 pixels high is a nice compromise between “pretty” and “efficient use of space.”

Barbara wrote:

Randy: You said you used WordPress to create your site. How did you get the links and other stuff at the top? I’m trying to create a blog using WrodPress, but using adaptive equipment is making it difficult. But, I wanted an introduction section at the top then links to go to other parts of the blog where I intend to keep articles for reference. I found the “instructions” at WordPress.com, but have no idea where to look for what I want. Is there a complete manual somewhere that I can download?

Randy sez: I added the links by editing the HTML code directly in the WordPress templates. This is one of those things that is “easy” if you are very familiar with HTML and CSS (and PHP, because WordPress is actually done in PHP) but it is “hard” if you aren’t familiar with those. I don’t know if there’s a manual anywhere that explains how to do it. I just starting opening files and figured out how it worked and experimented till I got what I wanted. It took me about an hour.

This is the sort of task that you could easily hire a web-savvy person to do in an hour or so. It should cost less than $100 and would be a one-time job. You should ask them to show you exactly which files they change and show you how to make minor changes (such as revising the wording).

ML Eqatin wrote:

I’m no expert, but after noodling with tables and getting my graphics squished, tiled, or otherwise messed up, I bit the bullet and learned to do frames on Dreamweaver. In frames, you don’t have to change every page, because each section of the screen is a separate ‘page’, meaning the title page never leaves the screen. I only have one frame, center front, that changes.

Randy sez: Frames definitely have their place. As an example, the documentation for the Java programming language is displayed using frames, and it works very well. When frames first came out, there was some excitement. The problem with frames (as I understand it) is that search engines index content in each frame separately, because, as you said, each frame is a separate page. So if a search engine sends somebody to a page on your site, it’s not going to be the WHOLE page as you wanted them to see it; instead, they’ll only go to that part of the page which was indexed. So they’ll see a PIECE of the page, presumably the main content without any menubars or header or footer.

I did an experiment just now to test this on MLE’s site. There is a page that begins “some world events to help orient the reader”. I typed this in Google in quote marks (so as to find all pages with exactly those words in that order). There was only one result, on MLE’s site. I clicked on that result, and up popped the text part of that page only, without all of MLE’s pretty graphics. Try this experiment and then go to MLE’s homepage at www.MLEqatin.com and see how she intended it to look.

For that reason, I don’t use frames on my site, and I would consider it problematic for most writers. If I am wrong on this point, no doubt my loyal blog readers will correct me quickly.

Karla wrote:

This is off-topic and in reference to the ebook by Meredith Efken you have offered to your subscribers. I had already purchased the two fiction CDs from you (and am still learning from them everyday), and now I just purchased the Writers Conference Survival Guide by Meredith Efken. I am so pleased with what I have learned from this ebook that I wanted to post here and let you know. I am excited because this gives me, an inexperienced conference attendee, an actual road map to follow. It was worth every penny and more. Thanks so much for this, Randy!

Randy sez: You’re welcome! Meredith’s little e-book is a nice quick read, and it’s packed with good information. I plan to use several of her appendices to plan my next conference. They’re quite handy. I will of course continue to ignore her excellent advice on how guys should dress and will continue to wear faded blue jeans and ratty shirts, because that’s part of my brand. A physicist who dresses nicely is going to be suspected of not being a “real” physicist.

Katie wrote:

This may be slightly off-topic, but is it good for writers to have more than one site? I have sites or have purchased domains for: my blog (currently on blogspot but well-linked), my “name” site (unfortunately .net), my brand site, a site for the newsletter I plan to start in the next few months, and a site for one aspect of writing in which I plan to become an expert. Is it wise to have these all as separate sites linked to each other, or should I combine them into one or more sites and simply forward the domains to the appropriate location?

Randy sez: This is a good question. There is no easy answer. I used to have one web site that was about me and my books. Then I added an article on a method of designing a novel which I called by the rather quirky name “The Snowflake Method.” Then I added more stuff on writing fiction. Before you knew it, that Snowflake thing had skyrocketed and made me famous.

At a certain point, I realized that I needed a separate site for all the info on writing. So I split off a new site (this one) after learning from one of the internet marketing masters about how to do it. (Tom Antion, who is a great teacher and a brilliant marketer.) I knew that I needed the words “fiction writing” in my URL, but unfortunately, my first choice, “www.FictionWriting.com” was taken long ago. I grabbed the .net version of that name, but I felt that I really wanted a .com in order to be taken seriously. Tom Antion mentioned that he had a site that began with the word “Advanced”. This has the advantage that it will most always be first in alphabetic order. That’s how I came up with “www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com”. I also got “www.BasicFictionWriting.com”. If you type that into your browser, you’ll come to this site. If you type in “www.FictionWriting.net” you’ll come to this site. If you type in “www.SupremeDictatorForLife.com” you’ll come to this site.

Getting back to Katie’s question, I would advise starting with one site and building that up and learning the skills. Then when the time comes (you’ll know when it comes) you can launch a new site, using the first one as a platform to get the new one off the ground quicker. You can continue spinning off new sites until your fingers get tired. In the meantime, you can point all the domains you own to your main site.

That’s all for tonight! We’ll continue on Monday, and I’m not entirely sure what we’ll be discussing. I think we’ve said an awful lot about web sites and blogs, and it may be long overdue to get back to the craft of writing fiction. I’ll mull it over the weekend. If you have a suggestion, post a comment here or email me privately.

Have a great weekend!

We’ve now been discussing for quite a long time the things you need to think about before you sit down to design your web site. If you’ve followed the whole discussion, and have answered all those 9 questions for yourself, then you now have a pretty good idea of what kind of site you want/need/can afford.

What’s next?

That all depends on you. It should be clear that there is no simple answer for everybody. There are a whole boatload of simple answers, each of which is great for some people and terrible for others.

But in a word, what comes next is design. “Design” is a process where you brainstorm up a good solution that meets all your requirements. Your requirements may be impossible. (For example, if you want a glitzy, database-driven site with lots of interaction, heavy graphics, and you want it yesterday at no cost, but you don’t want to do any of the work yourself, then you are in pipe-dream land. Can’t be done, although you might get most of that by just launching a blog.)

If your requirements are possible, then you need to sketch out the action plan to get from here to there. That’s your design. Only then should you start building the site (or getting someone else to do it).

A good design should take account of the possibility for change and make it as easy as possible to make changes across your whole site as quickly as possible. Let me give you two examples of that:

1) You may have noticed that I changed my little header strip just for today. (It’s the box above this blog that starts out “Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing” and then has a bunch of products with links.) Just for today, Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, I added a little link in red that says “24 Hour Special (Feb. 21, 2008)”. I added one line in one file yesterday, and that change showed up on every page of my web site. Tonight at midnight, I’ll change that line in one file, and the new change will show up on every page of my web site. That’s good design. Many web site designs would require you to manually make that change in every page. If you have hundreds of pages, that could be a real nightmare. A good design lets you make changes quickly.

2) Somebody emailed me today to say that he couldn’t sign up for my e-zine because my signup box was rejecting his email address, which ends in “.info”. I have a little JavaScript program that does some simple checks to make sure people don’t accidentally make some of the common typing errors. That program assumes that the email address will end with 2 or 3 characters after the dot. I changed it so it would take up to 4 characters. I only changed one file, but it instantly fixed all the signup boxes on every page of my site. That’s good design.

Good design uses something called “Cascading Style Sheets” to help set the look and feel for your web site. This is usually abbreviated “CSS” and it makes it easy to define the fonts, colors, background images, margins, paddings, and many other things EVERYWHERE on your site, just by changing one file. If you’ve ever had to change any of those manually on every page of a site, you know what a nightmare that is. Good design uses CSS for that. You can do most of your page layout using CSS, rather than using tables in HTML. That’s good design.

Good design is about being lazy — setting things up once, and letting the computer make sure that the same thing happens everywhere on your site. You may think this is obvious, but you’d be amazed how many sites have a terrible, wretched design. But I digress.

We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last few weeks. It’s time for questions. I can’t answer all possible questions, but I’ll make a stab at as many as possible. Ask what you want. We have some excellent web designers who read this blog, and some of them can likely answer questions that I can’t.

What would you like to know about designing your web site or blog? Post a comment here.

I am running another of my famous 24 Hour Specials today only, Thursday, February 21, 2008.

I am celebrating the launch of a new product, which I hope you’ll find useful.

At the same time, I’m giving a substantial price break on a couple of my existing products, Fiction 101 and Fiction 201.

If you’ve been wanting to get a deal on either Fiction 101 or Fiction 201, OR if you’re curious about the new product, check it out on the information page here.

As we discussed on this blog a few days ago, I rarely run ads on this blog or in my e-zine. This is one of those rare occasions.

This 24 Hour Special will run from midnight to midnight, PST, Thursday, February 21, 2008.

Have fun!

We’ve been discussing author web sites and blogs for quite a while now. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of important questions you should ask yourself before you build that site or blog. I’ve now discussed most of those in some detail, but there are a couple left to deal with. We’ll hit those tonight.

But first, a couple of questions came in today:

Anne asked:

I have a question that is not exactly related to the topic but I have needed to ask for a long time. Does it cost anything to get your work copyrighted? How do you go about it? I have some ideas for stories but I haven’t written them on my blog yet because I was afraid someone would steal my idea.

Randy sez: My standard disclaimer: I’m not a copyright attorney and am not qualified to give legal advice. So everything I say here should be considered as just my understanding of the copyright situation. When you write something, it belongs to you and is yours under copyright law. Nobody else has the rights to use it, although they do have some limited rights to use parts of it if they give you due credit and they follow the rules. Getting your work formally copyrighted is a way to prove that you are the real author, but it doesn’t change your actual rights. Normally, my publisher pays for the copyrights for my novels. I put a copyright notice at the bottom of my web pages.

Putting your stories on your blog might be considered as publishing them, and many publishers would therefore not be too interested in republishing them. And if you put your stories on your blog or web site, your ideas might well be borrowed by others. (You can’t copyright an idea — you copyright the expression of that idea. If somebody writes their own version of your story, you might be out of luck.)

Karen wrote:

While learning what all those icons were for I found IWeb pages that have a selection of styles to use for a simple site. They don’t have the flexibility other sw has, but for a first time exposure site, I’m hoping it will do fine. I haven’t selected a hosting site yet, but have bought all my domains and anything similar, as you suggested.

Now, Ran, you know your talking to someone that when it comes to computers I don’t know my keyboard from my cat food, but, if I host these IWeb pages on a site by GoDaddy, will I be able to change things later when I need to apply PayPal or links to Amazon?

Randy sez: I love my Mac too, but I was not real jazzed with iWeb. I played with it just a little and found that pages it produces are actually pictures of pages. They are still searchable because the text is saved in something called “alt” tags, but it seemed to be not the sort of tool I need for my own web development. There is no denying that iWeb is super easy to use.

To answer your question, yes, you should be able to change things later, no matter what hosting system you use. To see an example of a small web site made with iWeb, check out James Scott Bell’s web site at www.JamesScottBell.com.

Now let’s get to those last two questions that every author should answer. I’ll consider some of the possible responses, and discuss the implications of each choice.

Question 8) When do you want your site done?

Answer a: Yesterday, when my book came out!

Randy sez: It would have been good to create your site a few months ago, so you could put the URL in your book for interested readers. That way, your book would be a nice advertisement for your web site (although the web site would probably not be much of an advertisement for the book — it’s simply too late for that to happen). But all is not lost. Create a web site today with a domain that exactly matches the name on your book if you possibly can get it. Put a blog on it. You can do that in one day. Some of the folks who read your book will guess you might have a web site and will guess what it is. Have something on your blog that will meet their needs. This might be as simple as: “Sign up for my newsletter so you’ll know when my next book comes out.” You can use this base to help promote your NEXT book. You may think this is dumb, but this is in essence exactly the strategy most authors use. It’s not a great strategy, but it’s SOMETHING.

Answer b: Today would be great

Randy sez: Decide why today would be great. Is there something very urgent that requires it to be today? If so, see my response to (a) above. But if not, take things a little slower. Answer all nine of the questions. (You can find them all here). Write down your answers. Make a strategy. Find a good webmaster if you plan to hire that task out. Give them your answers. Talk to the webmaster. Talk to web-savvy friends. Buy me a Snapple at a writing conference and pick my brains. Then build your site. A little design goes a long way. Fixing a badly designed site is five times the work of doing it right the first time.

Answer c: This week

Randy sez: See my response to (b) above. There is rarely a good reason to rush into a web site or blog.

Answer d: This month

Randy sez: It’s very reasonable to work through all the questions, find a webmaster, and get a good prototype done in a month. It might take longer. It might be quicker. If you’re in a rush, make sure there’s an excellent reason to rush. People say, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” I say, “Build a site in haste, repent for all eternity.”

Answer e: Within the next few months

Randy sez: There’s nothing wrong with taking a lot of time and doing it right, especially if you have many other things going on. A few months is a reasonable time span, although it’s leisurely. You could do it all in a month, if it’s a high priority. If it’s not, then take those few months.

Answer f: Someday

Randy sez: See my answer (e) above. My response is the same.

Answer g: I have a web site, but it needs revamping

Randy sez: It’s never too late to think everything through carefully and define your requirements precisely. This may be a golden chance to do it right this time. If you’ve had a web site up for months or years and the thing is starting to look like all the vamp has gone out of it, then a revamp might be just the ticket. You may want to totally restructure your web site. But that could lead to a problem. Suppose you’ve got a ton of incoming links to your site, and now you want to move all those pages around (or even move to a new domain?) There is something called a .htaccess file that will help you redirect all those links. I did this a year ago when I moved my domain from www.rsingermanson.com to just plain www.ingermanson.com. I set up a .htaccess file on the old site to repoint all those precious links to the new site. For a time, the search engines got a little confused, but my high rankings for many search phrases recovered pretty quickly.

Question 9) Do you want the search engines to bring visitors to your site?

Answer a: Yes

Randy sez: Good for you! You do need to make sure that each page has a dominant topic. Webmasters and internet marketers often talk about “search engine optimization”. There are few topics where so much misinformation is so widely believed. If you look around the web, you’ll hear many different opinions. It is best to listen to those who actually achieve high rankings than to listen to those who haven’t. My own source of info is James Brausch, who I think has done simply the best job of anyone on the web of doing hard numerical research. Check out his blog at www.JamesBrausch.org. I’ve not found anyone who knows more than he does.

Answer b: No, I could care less about search engines

Randy sez: Wow, that’s a rare attitude. Why in the world would you have a web site if you don’t want search engines to bring people to your site? I’m not criticizing, of course. I’m merely aghast.

Answer c: I have no idea, but I suppose it sounds good

Randy sez: Yes, it’s good. Search engines brought order to the web. It’s because of search engines that I can sit down at my computer and find out critical information in less than sixty seconds that used to take a trip to the library. And I can do it a 1 AM, the night before my book is due. (Yes, I have done this. I have literally done exactly this.) If you have a web site that you want people to visit, you should care about the search engines. If you don’t want people to visit, then, um . . . why bother?

Today, I want to continue looking at the questions that you should answer before you build your web site. I posted a list of these a week or two ago and have been working through this list adding more details on them. Before I get to that, I’d like to respond to a couple of comments that my loyal readers posted today:

Lynn wrote:

Randy, one of the things my husband and I have been discussing over the last few months has been to add downloadable audio and possibly video files to our website. This idea came from a discussion with a number of people who listen to mp3s or books on cd (my husband does this every day when he drives to work). My question is on the layout of a website to allow for this. Would it be better to have a list of these files on the front page or a link to a page that has a list of files (right now we only have pdf files for download)?

Randy sez: This is a good idea and could be quite an attraction. I would not put them on the main page unless that’s what the whole site is about. (If it is, then do it that way.) But it’s probably better to have one page devoted to your digital downloads. If you do this, be sure to compress those MP3 files pretty tight. I’ve found that 11 MB per hour of audio works pretty well. (Normal audio is 600 MB per hour of audio). You might want to upload the video to YouTube and then just display it on your own page. I’m not quite sure how to do that, but lots of people do it, so it can’t be too hard.

Lara wrote:

I’m late to the conversation here, but wanted to point out a good (FREE!) open source web site development program. With a little front-end programming by my software engineer husband, I was able to put together my entire website on my own using Joomla.

Randy sez: Sounds great! I don’t know much about Joomla. I’ve heard of it, and from what I gather, it’s a Content Management System. I would be interested, Lara, to hear more about it. If you want to email me a few paragraphs about it privately, I’ll summarize it here, since it would be of general interest to my blog readers.

Charlotte wrote:

Do you have any ideas on using one wordpress installation for several blogs? I would prefer to do all my customizing at tone time, and not for six or eight installations individually for time and energy constraints if nothing else.

Randy sez: No, I don’t know how easy or hard this would be. I’ve never tried this. You should be able to create one WordPress “theme” and use it on all your blogs. (A “theme” is the cusomizable part of your blog that determines how it looks and how it’s laid out. I took the default WordPress theme and modified it to get my own.)

Now let’s turn to Questions #6 and #7 on my list. I’ll reiterate that you MUST answer all 9 questions at some point. If you don’t, you are going to wind up with a site you don’t want or can’t use. #6 and #7 have to do with how much energy and money you’re willing and able to expend on your web site and/or blog.

Question 6) Can you do the techie stuff?

Answer a: No, I can’t do it and won’t learn; I want to pay somebody else to do it all

Randy sez: This is going to limit your options, because it means that any time you want to make changes to the HTML of your web site, you need to pay somebody to do it. If you want to add content yourself, it would make sense for you to pay somebody to set up a nice Content Management Site (a blog is a simple example) that would allow you to add new stuff whenever you want. You’ll not be able to make certain types of changes to your site, but that might be just fine with you.

Answer b: No, I want to use a simple Sitebuilder web site that I can use to create my site without paying anybody; I understand that this means I can’t make super complex sites, but I just want something simple for now

Randy sez: Again, this may be a limitation on you, so be aware of that going in, and try to find a Sitebuilder that will allow you to do the kinds of things that you know you’ll need to do. If you need to be able to add info about your books, graphics of your books, etc., then make sure the system you use lets you do that.

Answer c: No, I need somebody to set it up, but I’d like to be able to make a few small changes, if somebody shows me how

Randy sez: If you have a webmaster build your site, let them know this upfront. Tell them you want them to use a technology that can be edited by a beginner. For example, if they build the site using FrontPage, then you can use FrontPage to make minor changes and you probably won’t mess things up. Likewise, if they build the site using DreamWeaver, you can use DreamWeaver (or a simpler program named Contribute which is designed to work with DreamWeaver sites) to make minor changes to the site. “Minor changes” here means things like changing the text on the page or maybe even using a page template to create a whole new page that you then edit.

Answer d: No, I need somebody to set it up, but then I want to learn how to do fairly major things

Randy sez: See my comments to Answer c above. Tell your webmaster this is what you want to do. Make them tell you in advance what tools you’ll need to buy in order to work on the site. Make them tell you how much time it’ll take for you to learn how to use these tools, and how much it’ll cost you. Any webmaster should know the answers to these questions and be able to explain them to you in plain English.

Answer e: No, but I can use one of those programs like DreamWeaver or FrontPage that does all the hard stuff; I’m willing to spend some time to learn to use them

Randy sez: Good for you! Both of these programs can produce quite complicated web sites. It would be wise to get some training. The truth is that an amateur can create a bad structural design using these tools (just as an amateur artist can create bad art using powerful graphics tools like PhotoShop or FireWorks). There are classes at many community colleges that will get you going. And there an infinite number of books on how to use these tools.

Answer f: No, but I can learn how to hand-code my pages; just tell me what books to buy!

Randy sez: This was my own approach, and it’s served me well (with the caveat that I don’t do my own graphics — I hire that out). The books go quickly out of date, and they’re all geared to different kinds of people. Go to a good bookstore, look at the Web Design section, and look at every single book on a given subject. Pick the two that seem best geared to you and buy them. One will turn out to be a lot more useful than the other, but you won’t realize this until you’ve read 200 pages of each. Start with books on HTML. Then learn CSS. After that, a good book on PHP might be useful.

Answer g: Yawn, of course! I know HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Ruby, Perl, Java, or I can learn them from a book

Randy sez: Then you are where I am now (except I don’t care for Perl and haven’t really got far into Ruby yet). Each of these tools has its place. If you know all these, go to it. You’ll soon have a great web site.

Question 7) How much do you want to spend on your site?

Answer a: I want a free site

Randy sez: You can build a free site. There are places that host a free site. There is a major disadvantage, though. If you get a free site, the domain will not be yours. And if you ever decide to move your free site, any links that go to your site will break. If you spend a few dollars per month to have a site on your own domain (for example, my domain here is www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com), then you can move your site to a new hosting service at any time, and all the links to your site will still work. So be careful! Are you sure you really want it free? One of your free options is to put up a free blog on Blogspot.com or WordPress.com. Lots of people do this. Some of these blogs are quite successful. But as we discussed a few weeks ago, your web site doesn’t get that traffic, and that might be a problem for you.

Answer b: Nothing up front, and less than $10 per month for maintenance

Randy sez: Hmmmm, this has about the same disadvantages as a free site. See the above comments.

Answer c: A few hundred bucks up front, and as little as possible for maintenance.

Randy sez: For this price, you’ll need to do most of the work yourself, or pay for a small site. A small site can be a GOOD site, of course. A blog, in fact, might be a good option, since it should be quite to cheap to pay somebody to create a blog for you. Any good webmaster should be able to create a blog on your own domain and teach you how to use it for a few hundred bucks.

Answer d: A couple of thousand dollars up front, and less than $100 per month after that

Randy sez: You can get a very nice web site for that kind of money. Of course, that might be overkill. You should look at your answers to Questions 1 through 5 to see if you need that much web site. (Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Only you know the answers. It all depends what your goals are.)

Answer e: Cost is no object; give me the best!

Randy sez: I don’t hire myself out to do web sites, but . . . if cost is REALLY no object, send me a million dollars via certified check and I will give you a very nice site. Very nice. Of course, once again I’d caution you to first make sure that you really need a Ferrari, if a Honda might do the job for you. Again, this comes down to the things you really need your site to be able to do, and you are the sole judge of that.

Today, we’ll resume our running discussion of blogs and web sites and what you need to do to develop them. First, I’ll tackle a few questions from readers:

Cori asked:

Randy, I am interested in starting a blog. If we quote someone, maybe you let’s say, and we give you attribution, are we supposed to seek permission first?

Also, what is the cyber acceptable procedure for including links on a website or blog? Do we need a signed contract of acknowledgement from the originator?

Randy sez: The usual copyright rules still apply. If you quote an entire article on your web site or blog, you’d better have permission from the real author. With Google at hand, it’s easy for me to check if somebody is quoting my articles without permission (and sometimes they do it without even an attribution, so it looks like they wrote it).

If you quote a sentence or two from a blog or web article, that’s generally fine, but you should link to them. That’s not only polite, it even helps them.

As for links to other web sites or blogs, I’ve never heard of anyone complaining about an incoming link! Those are good! If you want to link to my web site or blog, feel free! Even if you don’t want to, do it anyway!

Incoming links strengthen a web site. There is no down-side to an incoming link. No need to ask permission. Just do it.

Camille wrote:

ehhhmmm…. good question Cori. Maybe I should have asked that one before I put a link to Randy’s blog in my last blog post. (I had some very scathing things to say about this blog and the appalling lack of in-your-face advertising.)

Randy sez: Thanks, Camille! Scathe me all you want, as long as you link to me!

Sesgaia asked (regarding the YouTube contest I blogged about last week):

I’m curious- how does something like this contest figure in to an already existing goals plan? Would it be considered an interruption, or would it just require re-arranging other priorities? Because it certainly seems time-consuming…

Randy sez: From a time-management perspective, a contest like that is an interruption. When an opportunity like that comes in, I ask whether the payoff is worth the time investment. If not, then I skip it. For me, the time to create a YouTube video is not much. I spent about half an hour total writing my script. I filmed a test video on my iMac using the built-in camera. Right now, the audio quality isn’t great and I need to make a couple of tweaks to the physical environment, but I’m almost ready to shoot the final version. For me, the biggest problem has been that I didn’t have much experience making a movie with iMovie until I tried this, so I’m burning some time learning that. However, I was planning to produce some video products in the next few months anyway, so I might as well learn it now as later. For me, the time is worth it, but it’s also delaying my current Short Term Target, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

OK, let’s move on to talk about web site requirements some more. Some days ago, I posted a list of 9 questions you should ask yourself before you design your web site or blog. I’ve discussed 4 of those in more detail. Today, we’ll look at #5, along with some possible responses:

Question 5) How interactive do you want your site?

Answer a: I just want to show information; the user just needs to be able to get from one page to the others by clicking links

Randy sez: Good! This is simple and you could easily learn to do those links yourself. So you have options. You can build your whole site, or have a pro do it and then update it yourself.

Answer b: I may have a few forms on my site, (for example, a form that sends email)

Randy sez: Forms are a simple type of interaction, and you can easily do those without any help from anyone, if you take the time to learn how.

Answer c: I want fancy graphics that move around; show me some glitz, Baby!

Randy sez: Sigh. Once again, make sure you have a good reason for this, because this is going to cost you in terms of time, energy, and aggravation.

Answer d: I want my users to be able to leave comments (for example, comments on a blog)

Randy sez: This is relatively easy to do, at least within a blog, because all you need is blogging software, which is freely available.

Answer e: I want users to be able to enter information into databases so my site can display that or do computations (for example, an income tax calculating web site)

Randy sez: This is much more work, unless you can find software somewhere that does exactly what you want. But normally, this requires you to create a database and then write software in some language such as Perl, PHP, Java, or Ruby to hook up your web pages to the database. It’s doable, but be prepared to pay for it, either in time or money.

We’ll look at the next question on the list tomorrow.