I’m in the middle of completely redesigning my website. Okay, I’m not the one doing the design–I hired someone for that–but I am working on content. I’ve been going through my website and deciding what should stay and what should go.
The first thing I’ve doing is dumping my personal blog. I never really had anything to say there, and rarely post. I post here and at Murderati bi-weekly, and at Romancing the Blog bi-monthly, and that’s enough for me. Probably too much–but right now it’s manageable most of the time.
I’m adding a connecting characters chart or page of some sort. I have something like it on my blog, but I need to rework it to make it more user friendly and understanding. This will also include a booklist, which I have on the site now but it’s kind of hidden! I pretty much know what I’m going to keep and what I’m going to cut–for example, my “about” section is sorely out-of-date, and I need to completely update and rewrite my bio–but there are a couple of things I’m undecided on.
First, the section I currently call FOR WRITERS.
I never–or rarely–update this section. I intended to post articles related to writing here (duh) but the blogs that would make good articles I don’t want to spend the time editing to work. I don’t know if I have the time to create new content for this section, but I remember reading the For Writers area on Lisa Gardner’s website and learning so much, plus a few other authors who posted some great information that helped me understand this or that before I sold.
Yet, I could post some of my motivational emails or even the speech I’m writing for the New Jersey RWA Conference I’m speaking at next month. (Yes, Rocki, I’m actually WRITING A SPEECH. Don’t know if I’ll stick to it, but I’m going to have something in print before I walk up and embarrass myself in front of a couple hundred people . . . )
Is this an area that you visit on author’s websites? What kind of information would you like to see on a For Writers page? Or is this something you never check out or find useful?
My second big unknown is whether to keep the Author Q&A. I’ve been told these are great to have–and I know that my publicist (my first one at Ballantine, Gilly,) loved that I had it–but it doesn’t get a lot of click-throughs, even though the “about” page that’s off of is second only to the books page for click throughs off the main index page. That might be because it’s kind of hidden.
Do you like Author Q&A’s? Why or why not? What kinds of questions to you like to see answered? What would you ask me that you think the answer would be good to post to my website?
Book trailers. I love them. I will probably do one for the Seven Deadly Sins series. But like I did for the FBI trilogy, it’ll be short to give the reader a feeling for the series instead of details about specific titles. I think. 🙂
Do you like book trailers? If so, which are your favorites and why? If not, why not?
And finally, excerpts. My excerpts get a good number of click-throughs–not out of this world, but high enough that they’re definitely worth keeping up. Do you read excerpts on author’s websites? What about in the back of books?
Thanks for your input! Because you’re all helping me, I’ll randomly pick three people to win books for yourself or a friend. (I’ll post the winners over the weekend!)
OTHER THINGS . . . .
ORIGINAL SIN is in production! Yeah! I’ll be getting the copyedits in a couple weeks. Now I’ve started writing CARNAL SIN. Why are the beginnings so hard? LOL.
I wrote the brief, very rough synopsis for the first Lucy Kincaid book. The working title is NO WAY OUT. Don’t know if they’ll keep it, but they seem to like it . . . and it fits the book; I love it when that happens.
I’ll be out of town next week with some members of my FBI Citizens Academy Alumni group. We’re going to Washington to tour Quantico and FBI Headquarters. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a year!
And I’m turning 40 next Tuesday. This one is harder than when I turned 30 . . .