Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We’ve been talking about “one-sheets” recently. A “one-sheet” is a sheet of paper that you take with you to help you in pitching yourself and your manuscript to an editor or agent. This is generally most useful to you at a writing conference, since that’s a common place to meet either an editor or agent for an appointment.

I asked Meredith Efken, author of the Writers Conference Survival Guide, to help me respond to the many questions my loyal blog readers have posted here in the last few days. Meredith types scorchingly fast, and she sent me a vast amount of material. I’ll be posting it here over the next few days, along with my own comments.

Meredith’s first comment is the following:

On one-sheets: It’s not surprising to me that editors aren’t asking for one-sheets. These are a fairly new innovation that WRITERS came up with. They actually snitched the idea from professional speakers who send out one-sheets as part of their media kit–once again proving how creative and brilliant we writers really are. I have never used a one-sheet either, because I got an agent before one-sheets became popular. So no, they’re not “essential.”

But they are a great visual tool for a couple of reasons. One, they give the nervous writer a “cheat sheet” to use in the pitch session. Those of you who blank out and can’t remember a thing about your book the moment you sit down with an editor will love using a one-sheet. Two, if you have one that looks professionally designed, it can become a powerful tool to help the editor visualize your story concept as well. Remember, the pitch session is essentially a business presentation, so having a professional-looking visual tool to go along with your verbal pitch can be helpful. It’s not required, but it is useful.

The thing to remember is that the editor may or may not take the one-sheet with them. Don’t ask them to, and don’t be upset if they hand it back to you. One-sheets are pitching tools, and if your pitch went well, then the one-sheet functioned properly. Do get one that looks professional, though. A sloppy, home made one is worse than none at all. If you aren’t able to create or pay for a professsionally designed one, then you can certainly make yourself a cheat sheet. I just wouldn’t advise giving the cheat sheet to the editor.

Randy sez: I mostly agree with Meredith here. I don’t particularly see the need for a professional one-sheet, since I see it as a pitching aid, not a pitch in itself. If you need it to remind yourself what you want to say, then a 3×5 card is as good as $300 one-sheet. If you believe that a glossy piece of paper is going to sell your book without some stellar writing to back it up, then please come buy a bridge that I own. It’s just north of San Francisco, and in good shape, but I don’t need it anymore because we moved.

Now that I think about it, I have used a one-sheet once. Years ago, John Olson and I pitched an idea for a Mars novel to an editor friend (Steve Laube, now an Xtremely successful agent) at a writing conference. We walked into the appointment with a blank pad of paper and a head full of ideas. John pitched the idea. Steve listened. I nodded my head wisely and kept quiet because I was a terrible pitcher in those days. During the 45 minute conversation, we sketched out the journey to Mars on the blank pad. That was our “one-sheet.” When we finished the pitch, Steve said, “Sounds great, guys. Now show me some great writing.” Months later, we sent him a proposal with three killer chapters. He bought the book and you can read those chapters in our novel OXYGEN. I don’t know what became of our “one-sheet.”

Meredith also had some good comments on Hannah’s question about how much of your manuscript should be done before you pitch:

I think it’s best for an unpublished writer to have as much of the manuscript finished as possible before pitching. First, you’ll have to have a complete manuscript in order to sell it or sign with your first agent. Okay, yes there have been exceptions to that, but in the vast majority of cases, you can’t sell your first book without having finished it.

To pitch it, I don’t think you have to have it completely written, since the proposal review process takes months. But it should be pretty far along. Remember, it’s not just finishing the book that counts–once you finish the manuscript, all you have is a completed rough draft. You don’t want to send an interested editor or agent a rough draft. Leave time for revisions.

Second, you’ll look more viable and serious as a writer if you can honestly say, “Yes, I’m within four chapters of finishing the manuscript” or “Yes, it’s written.” It will show you’ve put in time and effort into your project and aren’t just pitching an idea you came up with in the shower that morning. Third, even for published writers, it’s difficult to pitch a project you aren’t yet familiar with. You can have all the pre-writing done that you want, but the voice and flavor of the novel develops as you labor over the manuscript. You discover things about your characters you hadn’t seen before, and there may be important plot changes you make once you get into the writing of the story.

Having recently sold two books on sample chapters alone, and then having to write the books, I am finding that it’s sort of like having a safety net ripped out from under a tight-rope walker. My editor is now expecting the book to look like what I pitched, even if I get into it and want to take it a new direction. I still have creative freedom, but I have to be careful. I would NOT have wanted to try this as a first-time author.

So, as a final response to this question, I would recommend a first-timer to have at least several sample chapters completed, and preferrably half to three-quarters of the book finished before pitching. Your pitch will be stronger and it will be less pressure if you get a proposal request and eventually a full manuscript request.

Randy sez: I agree with this. On Monday, I talked about my less-than-stellar pitch of my first novel TRANSGRESSION to Chip MacGregor years ago. He requested the first hundred pages, which I had in first-draft form. Later he requested the whole manuscript, and again, all I had was a completed first draft. What did I do? I sent it to him, but I made it VERY clear–this is a first draft and it’s really rough.

He bought the book based on the first draft, and THEN I had to do revisions in about four months. At the time, that seemed horrendously short, and I had a lot of anxiety about it, even though they didn’t ask for much revision. (These days, four WHOLE months to do revisions seems like an eternity.) I worked very hard to revise the story the way I knew I wanted it. It would have been very nice to have a more polished manuscript to give him upfront, but you play the hand you’re dealt. I had been waiting ten years to get published at that point, and I was not going to tell him, “Oh, sorry, I’ve just got this crappy first draft so you’ll have to wait for it.” So I gave him what I had.

Tomorrow, I’ll post more of Meredith’s comments and answer more of the questions that are piling up.

I can see we are way overdue to talk about pitching yourself (and your manuscript) at conferences. So far, there are about 25 comments responding to my last post, and many of those have excellent questions which deserve excellent answers.

Camille mentioned Meredith Efken’s terrific e-book WRITER’S CONFERENCE SURVIVAL GUIDE. I should have mentioned that in my last post but I forgot. Meredith is my freelance editor and one of the funniest novelists I’ve ever read, and her e-book tells you just about everything you can imagine on conferences. I’ve asked Meredith to answer some of your questions, so those will be appearing over the next few days (until we wear her out).

Lynette asked:

Onto my question, what is the difference between a one-sheet and a one page synopsis of the novel?

Randy sez: A “one-sheet” is kind of like a mini-proposal. It’s partly about you and partly about the book. The emphasis should be on arousing interest in the editor or agent. You typically use it during a one-on-one meeting to help you present what you want to present.

A one-page synopsis is a very high-level summary of the plot of the story. It will not mention you, the author, at all. Frankly, most one-page synopses are about as exciting as a phone book. Useful information, to be sure, but they contain only about five paragraphs, one to set the stage and one for each of the major chunks of the storyline. A one-page synopsis is generally too short for a proposal; I recommend doing about 2 single-spaced pages for a proposal, which gives you enough room to summarize every sequence of scenes in about one paragraph.

I have never used a one-sheet. Nobody ever told me about them back in the bad old days when I was scared to death to meet editors or agents. Nowadays, I’ve gotten past those fears and anyway, most editors know me now, so there’s no point in giving them a one-sheet with my bio. So I usually sit down and just talk without an agenda. I’ll tell them what I’m working on and find out what they’re working on and that’s that.

Those of you who have nice one sheets, go ahead and email them to me and I’ll be happy to post them on my site as examples. As my way of thanking you, I’ll include a link back to your web site or blog.

Hannah asked:

What and how much questions regarding the project am I expected to answer? Do I need to have a lot of details finished? I guess, what I am really asking is, how much of the project should be finished in my mind before I try to pitch it?

Randy sez: You should give the genre, the expected word-count (to the nearest 10,000 words), a one-sentence summary and a one-paragraph summary. You should also tell how much of the manuscript is complete and whether it is polished or first-draft. You should also have a bio about yourself. We have discussed many of these issues separately over the past year on this blog. You do not have to have the whole project finished, but be aware that you will NOT sell a first novel unless the manuscript is finished and polished. You may possibly get an agent before then, however. If your novel is only partly finished, then your mindset should be, “My one-sheet is a chance to introduce myself to an editor and arouse interest, but I’ll have to wait till it’s done before this editor is going to be ready to consider buying it, so this is really just an introduction and nothing more.”

Once again, I’ll emphasis that a one-sheet can arouse interest, but it cannot sell your manuscript. What sells your manuscript is your manuscript.

Let me tell you a story which I’ve told several times. Years ago, I met an editor named Chip MacGregor at a writing conference. I made an appointment with Chip and did absolutely everything wrong–except one thing. I had brought five pages of my manuscript. They were the first five pages, and they ended with a strong hook.

Despite the fact that I practically babbled at Chip, (or maybe because I was babbling), he asked to read my sample pages. They were good pages and he asked me to send the proposal and 100 pages. I did, and that led eventually (18 months later) to selling my first novel, TRANSGRESSION. I can assure you that my babbling didn’t sell the book. If I’d had a one-sheet, that would have helped me not look like an idiot, but it would not have made one speck of difference in the final result.

As a postscript, Chip later became my agent and we worked together for several years, until he moved on to a job with a major publisher. Now he’s agenting again and is more successful than ever. I am one of the many authors he discovered, and I’m certainly not the only one who babbled like a loon during the first interview. Every editor and agent knows how to look past the babbling to the essential point: “Can this writer write?”

That’s all for today. Tomorrow, I’ll take up more of the questions you all posted, and Meredith will also be chipping in answers to some of them. Stay tuned!

I’ve been reading all the comments over the last couple of days and am completely depressed at all the great books that I’ll never have time to read. I’ve also been staying up late every night reading (when I was supposed to be blogging) so I could finish rereading Harry Potter #6.

I have to say I am incredibly impressed with the ending of this book. HP #6 breaks the pattern of the other books by NOT ending with a victory for Harry. The reason, of course, is to put Harry in a box and force an ending to the series. So the book ends in Xtreme disaster, in which much of what you thought certain is no longer certain. This is the first time I’ve read #6 since reading the 7th and final book in the series, and I noticed some clever things designed to mislead the reader. JK Rowling of course does clever things to mislead the reader in every book, but she usually clarifies them by the end of the book. Not so in Book #6. I’m looking forward to rereading #7.

One of my loyal blog readers recently emailed me to ask about pitching her novel at a forthcoming writing conference. She particularly wanted to know about “one-sheets.” I am not able to answer detailed questions like this in email anymore because I get so much email. However, I promised to address this on my blog. I’m thinking it’s time to discuss writing conferences again, since we’re in the middle of conference season, and I myself will be going to a couple in the next 10 weeks.

What is a “one-sheet?” Good question. It’s whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s one sheet of paper. A “one-sheet” tells a bit about you and your book, summarizing all the high points.

Do you need a “one-sheet” to sell your book? LOL, I have never made a one-sheet. I’m sure it’s handy for breaking the ice when meeting an editor or agent, but you can do that just as well yourself by . . . being yourself. And trust me, you are more interesting than a piece of paper.

When you meet an editor or an agent, you are really pitching two things simultaneously–your project and yourself. Let’s talk about those in order:

Your project: It’s handy to have a one-sentence summary for your project. We talked about this a couple of months ago. Remember, a one-sentence summary does not sell your book. Great writing sells your book. The one-sentence summary just saves time by letting the editor or agent know in 5 seconds whether or not they might be interested in it. The purpose of the one-sentence summary is to get the editor or agent to read your sample chapters. Those chapters will make or break the book. Period. Every editor I’ve ever heard comment on what makes them buy a book has said the same thing: “I’m looking for great writing.”

Yourself: It is a good idea to be clean and neat but there is no reason to go overboard on dressing up. However, there are exceptions to this rule. If your brand is “walking pig-sty” or something similar, then you should present that image. And if your brand is “super-stylish fashionista” then you better be dressed that way. My brand is something along the lines of “zany physicist” so it is expected that I’ll dress like a geek. It would (I believe) be a mistake for me to dress up for a meeting with an editor, because no zany physicist would be caught dead looking fashionable. So be yourself. The editor or agent is going to be asking, “How can I sell this writer?” If you are famous, fascinating, funny, beautiful, outrageous, or whatever–anything that will make you insanely more marketable than the next writer–then highlight that. If you are none of those (most writers, quite honestly, aren’t) then don’t worry about it too much. In that case, be neat and clean and highlight your writing.

So getting back to the tangent, do you need a one-sheet? The short answer is this: If you can make one in a day or two that will nicely summarize who you are and what you’re writing, then do. If you are going to spend three months obsessing about one lousy piece of paper, then don’t. Obsess on your sample chapters instead.

OK, it’s question time. What burning questions do you have about pitching yourself and your manuscript? Leave a comment here and I’ll work through them.

I’ve spent the day putting together my e-zine and I am about all written out. So today, I’d like to point you to Chip MacGregor’s blog at www.ChipMacGregor.com. He’s got the best explanation of the economics of publishing that I’ve ever seen. If you’ve ever wondered about advances and how publishers earn their nickel, Chip will give you the goods.

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.

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.