Website upgrades and updates…
[Note from Steve: It’s the Ides of March today…and I wish an early happy St. Paddy’s day to everyone. Have fun, be safe!]
Authors have many items that represent fixed and continuing costs for doing business. These eat into royalties. Costs and profits—writing is a business. (I’m not very good at it, but that’s what it is, even if authors are having a lot of fun writing.) Like a supermarket, authors’ royalty income is small per each item sold, so it’s a profitable business only if lots of books are sold. But those fixed costs are often big ticket items relative to the cost of each item sold, akin to rent, construction, and personnel costs for those supermarkets.
Some costs like editing, formatting, and/or cover art are frequent but erratic and per book, but these add up unless authors only invest their time, i.e. are 100% DIY self-publishers—not a good idea for the items specifically mentioned, by the way. Others are sporadic and larger cost items. Again, unless authors are 100% DIY, a website is in this category—a “homemade” website can be OK, but there are pros who can do a better job.
There’s the initial cost of the website. Authors should hire a freelance guru or some company’s gurus to set up their websites (mine is Monkey C Media in San Diego). That gives authors a great-looking website ab initio, but they need to update and upgrade every so often. More costs. (I’m ignoring domain payments and hosting costs for now—they’re yearly.)
But the costs don’t end with that initial website construction. There are many costs that continue over the lifetime of the website. Authors can’t ignore the website once it’s built, either for content or website upgrades and updates. I’m in the middle of the latter process right now.
First, I prepare for the pros’ upgrades and updates by making their jobs a wee bit easier. I’m responsible for the text on my website. That’s just a continuous time investment because it is 100% DIY. I use WordPress that allows me to easily update the text on the web pages and post articles in my blog—those are things visible to the website visitor. I work a lot on the web pages’ text before approaching the gurus.
Graphics, margins, and such are more complicated. I never learned HTML (I know Fortran, C/C++, MaLab-ese, and UNIX scripts from my old day-job, but there’s a limit!). That means fixing those things, especially dropping in images like cover images and photos, and scaling them (most aren’t scaled properly for the web page), so it’s something I’d rather pay for vs. learning HTML or any of its successors (many cover images are also linked to the book’s Amazon page—I can give them those links, of course).
There are items that aren’t visible to the website visitor, though. Updates of WordPress in general—it seems to always be in beta-testing mode, not as bad as Microsoft software, but annoying all the same—and these updates always seem to cause problems. Updates must also be made to the apps I use, some visible as icons at the bottom of each web page and blog post, others only used by the administrator (me!) to track website stats and maintain a secure environment for all visitors (I work against spam, especially because I want to maintain the website’s PG-13 nature).
As some of you know, I offer a bunch of free PDFs for you to download (see the web page “Free Stuff & Contests”). I also update some of those. The little course on writing fiction, for example, takes the most time—I just included more references to blog posts from the “Writing” category, among other things—but I’m updating other free PDFs too.
Most of these updates and upgrades are works in progress, so please bear with me. Most of this isn’t too obvious to the visitor because the website structure remains the same. But it all costs time and money. The latter means you can help other authors and me by buying our books. Fiction writers are in the business of entertaining readers, and maintaining an interesting and entertaining website is one of the ways they do this. Beyond this, though, authors’ websites are places where readers feel at home while learning about the authors’ books and more about their lives—their histories, interests, why they write, and so forth. Today those websites offer one of the best looks into books, writers’ worlds, and the publishing business. Every writer should recognize their importance for readers.
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Comments are always welcome!
Last man alive? What about last woman alive? Penny Castro, LA County Sheriff’s Deputy and forensic diver, finds she isn’t alone, though—there are a few others who survive the contagion and want to kill her. And the remnants of a US government could be the greatest danger for her and the family she’s adopted. The post-apocalyptic thriller The Last Humans will soon be published by Black Opal Books and available at the publisher’s website, online retailers, and bookstores (if they don’t have it, ask for it!). Coming March 30! Pre-orders now accepted on Amazon and Smashwords.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
