Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

A quick note to let everyone know that I have sent out the latest issue of my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine last night. If you missed it, your ISP may be filtering my emails so you don’t even see my e-zine.

I have archived the latest issue on my site in the usual place:
www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com

Have fun!

Tonight, we’ll continue our discussion here of blogging and web site development.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been discussing the nuts and bolts of blogging. My last post, Content is King, brought in quite a range of questions which I’d like to answer today.

Pamela had a good report on an issue we talked about about a week ago:

End result is that I now will have control over my own site, so there is a happy ending! It’s because of Randy’s blog here that I was motivated to see how I could resolve things. Thanks, Randy.

Randy sez: Great to hear that, Pamela! Good things happen when you take action, and I’m glad you’ve got control of your site again. You still will have a lot of work, but at least you’re no longer log-jammed.

Charlotte wrote:

It is amazing how well you can build traffic to a blog just by posting every day, Monday through Friday. My work blog has gone from 68 hits the first month to nearly to over a 1000, during the holidays when there were no new posts and the college was closed for two weeks.

Since I have started back in January, we have had almost 2200 hits. Now, this blog is supposed to drive traffic back to our catalog website so people will register for classes, and my boss wants good information about what is going on at the college, and especially in our division. But the fact that it is hosted at wordpress.com means that there are aspects I don’t control, and I have no access to our web catalog at all, so I can’t track whether a person who comes through my blog and clicks to the catalog actually buys something. I also can’t set up any kind of autoresponder.

It is important to have access and control of your blog.

Randy sez: That’s an excellent growth record. Just keep building on that. Marketing is something that builds slowly from something small into something big. It doesn’t usually happen overnight. You’ll see results in time. It would be good if you can find a way to track your results, of course.

Sally wrote:

How do you hit a nerve that gets comments on a blog? Feedback is nice, but is it the goal? If there is no feedback, does that mean that no one is connecting with your thoughts, or that what you said is so self-explanatory that it needs no further explanation?

Randy sez: Only you can define your goals. Comments may or may not be important to those goals. If you have lots of comments on your blog, you have to read them, monitor for spam, and respond to them. So some bloggers don’t want comments and may even turn them off. I like comments because it enables my blog readers to interact with me and with each other. This is what some people call “creating community.” I think it’s a good thing. I learn a lot from my blog readers, and you all are able to help each other even when I don’t know the answer. I have no idea if it pays off in terms of dollars, but money is not my only goal in life. I have always believed that friends are more important.

So to answer Sally’s question, you should decide whether you WANT comments first. Is your blog about a topic where comments would be a good thing or a bad thing? Only you can decide that. If you decide that you want comments, then there are ways to solicit them. Ask a question of your readers that’s open-ended. Have a contest. Those always seem to generate a lot of comments.

Camille wrote:

I wondered the same thing as Sally. I wonder if Randy would share what his actual hit count is vs the number of posted comments. I bet it’s huge.

I was worried that Gail Martin was going to get lonely and pull her writing blog (www.writingright-martin.blogspot.com) because very little comments being posted…and why the heck not??? It’s full of great writing tips….for free! I started to spread the word about her blog. But she assured me her hit counter - or whatever the techie term for it is - showed plenty of readership. Whew. I didn’t want to lose a good, free thing.

She’s got Randy’s give-away-the-gold thing down. I think the fact that she gives away great writing advice will do nothing but help her while it helps others. She has a new book out that complements her blog content, but there’s no hard sell. You’ll either be interested in it, or not. Like pro wrestling.

Randy sez: I don’t look at my stats too often, but what I remember from mid-January, when I last looked was the following: About 500 people per day read this blog. I have about 1100 unique visitors to this site per day. They view a total of about 3400 pages per day. All of those numbers are substantially higher than a year ago. I launched this blog in April last year, and that was the catalyst for some of the growth. I also moved my Snowflake page to this site in June or July, and that has brought in a lot of readers also.

Camille mentioned Gail Martin’s blog. Gail is a friend of mine, and I have a link to her blog from my blogroll. Her content is EXCELLENT. I remember when she launched it how impressed I was about how well she “gives away her gold.” I’ll probably have Gail on as a guest sometime soon. She’s on my list of potential guests (I have a couple of dozen folks who’ve volunteered, so I won’t run out of guests soon.)

Rachael wrote:

After reading your posts about Simpleology, I signed up and have just completed 101. I’m in the process of mapping out my ultimate life, targets, etc. and have a couple of questions about how you did it.

I’ve noticed I can only have ONE short term, mid term, and long term target. Did this really frustrate you? Did you try to ‘get around’ it and add more in each field? Did you decide to go with the flow and truly only pick one target to work on the for whole week.

It’s completely unrealistic to me to only work on one target. There’s a lot more I want to do with my life that isn’t related to that target. Eg, if my goal is to write 15 pages per week of my manuscript, what about my goal to go in a triathlon in six months (as a way of losing weight and getting fit)?

How did you approach this?

Randy sez: I just reworked my Major Targets in Simpleology a few days ago. Yes, it is frustrating when you want to achieve everything all at once, but I have become more convinced than ever that I can really only have ONE target at a time in my life that’s most important.

Understand that I have many things that are going on all the time. I eat, I sleep, I pick up the mail, I do my daily chores around the house, I work at my consulting job, and a host of other routine things. These are HABITS. I do them every day without much thinking about them. They chew up some of my time.

There are also things that pop up that need doing NOW. That dentist appointment I made six months ago comes due. The “Change Oil” light comes on in my car. The garage gets too messy for words, and I take an hour to clean it up a little. The dog comes down with rabies. These aren’t habits, they’re INTERRUPTIONS. I deal with them when they come up and then get back to my routine.

Simpleology just assumes that these will come up, so it lets you schedule them into your life. But the purpose of Simpleology goes beyond dealing with HABITS and INTERRUPTIONS. Simpleology assumes that you want to ACHIEVE something in your life. Something that is going to take a big commitment from you for a substantial period of time, until you reach your goal. And the thesis of Mark Joyner, “The Simpleology Guy,” is that you should only have one of these ACHIEVEMENTS at a time that you’re focusing on. I think he’s right.

Let me illustrate. For the past several months, my long-term Major Target has been to get my next book published. In order to reach that, I had a medium-term Major Target to write a Snowflake, a proposal, and sample chapters, and get them ready for my agent. I achieved that over the weekend. (Hooray! It’s a big relief to get that done.) Now I’m shifting gears, because the next aspect of my long-term Major Target is to write the rest of the novel. That is best done by making a HABIT to write one scene very day. That’s going to take a few months, and it’s really on autopilot now. All I have to do is write that scene every day.

So over the weekend, I shifted focus back to this web site and its associated business. So now I have a new medium-term Major Target that involves creating a couple of new products and releasing them. (I won’t say just yet what they are.) That requires some focused effort or it’ll never get done. So that’s what I’m going to be focusing on. I identified four specific short-term Major Targets that I want to achieve in the next two months. Once those are done, I’ll decide on a new medium-term Major Target.

I really think a person can only FOCUS on one thing at a time. Of course, you can DO many tasks at once. I routinely do 8 to 10 tasks every day. But most of those are either HABITS or INTERRUPTIONS. Only one or two are the thing I’m focusing on. That’s all most of us can do in these busy lives of ours–find time to do a couple of tasks that are related to our passion. If you split your focus, then you just slow things down and prevent yourself from achieving what you want.

By the way, I finished the Simpleology course on blogging and found that it was a very useful summary. There was a lot of good information on how to use your blog to earn money, and some of it was new to me. I’m now taking the Simpleology course on “Viral Marketing Theory” and it looks like I’m going to learn a lot from this one.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Simpleology folks (besides the virtues of keeping things simple), it’s that succes in life comes from continuous improvement. If you were able to improve by only 1% every day, at the end of a year, you’d improve incredibly. (Not by a mere 365%, either. Because of the compounding effect, you’d improve by over 3700%!) So since September, I’ve been trying to make small improvements every week. (Every day is a bit much, but every week is really doable.)

Getting back to Rachael’s question, it sounds to me like writing 15 pages per week is a good solid habit, but it’s not really a Major Target. It sounds like doing that triathlon is a good long-term Major Target for you. You probably have a whole series of short-term and medium-term Major Targets along the way. Go fer it! Reach those Major Targets! Check them off! Keeping knocking them off until you do that triathlon. By that time, maybe the manuscript will be done, and you might then want to focus on getting it published as your next Major Target. At that point, you’ll be fit and trim and will likely have more energy than you do now and will be well able to tackle your next goal. Then daily exercise will become a mere habit that you do every day, and you’ll be focusing for a few months on pursuing publication. Make sense?

We’ve been talking for over a week about blogging. So far, it’s been the logistics. Why your blog should live on your site, how to get a domain, how to host a web site, how to design your site, and the need to pick a blogging software package. All of that might take a day or a week or even a month for you to get rolling, depending on how much you already know and whether you need to hire out some of the work.

What comes after that? Months and years of blogging, day in and day out. That brings us to the slogan I’ve quoted numerous times on this blog and in my e-zine. “Content is King.”

If you have great content, people will come to your blog, they’ll read your stuff, and they’ll keep coming back. Why? Because good content is unusual and great content is rare.

That’s where you have the advantage, because . . . you’re a writer. And writers create great content. Let’s define that. Great content has five attributes:
1) Valuable
2) Unique
3) Understandable
4) Entertaining
5) Free

Let’s talk about each of those in turn.

Great content is valuable. There are boatloads of crummy content on the web. Stuff people just threw together because they don’t want to give away their good stuff. Give away your good stuff! Give away your gold!

Great content is unique. If everybody else has your content, then why should anyone come to your site? But if you’re unique, then you’ve got a monopoly. That doesn’t mean you need to have top secret information that nobody else has (although that helps). Maybe your style or your attitude is unique.

Great content is understandable. Duh.

Great content is entertaining. We don’t live in the “Information Age.” That’s a fib foisted by the information people. We live in the “Entertainment Age.” If your content is entertaining, you are nine miles ahead of everyone else.

Great content is free. Like I said, give away your gold. Earn people’s trust by showing that you’ve got the goods. Goods that are valuable, unique, understandable, and entertaining. If you do that, people are happy to buy from you when you’ve got something to sell. You know that’s true, because that’s who you buy from–people you trust.

Put great content on your web site, day after day, year after year. If you do that, you’ll build a reputation (or as some call it, a “brand.”) When it comes time for your book to come out, your market will have found you.

We’ll continue talking about that next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liz noted this:

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

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

Gerhi pointed out something I hadn’t noticed:

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

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

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

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

What happens next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie wrote:

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

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

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

Karla asked:

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

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

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

Lisa asked:

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

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

Lynda wrote:

What would a moderately priced web site cost?

Andrew answered:

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

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

Mary wrote:

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

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

Pamela wrote a word of warning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you get a web site?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Along those lines, Gerhi posted the following question today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvia wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

Kristi wrote:

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

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

D’Ann Mateer wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yvette asked:

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

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

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

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

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

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