What did you do in school today, dear little boys of mine?
I decided that I would make myself an author website, distinct from By Light Unseen Media’s site.
I had actually twigged to the importance of this in January when I was collecting data on hundreds of authors for Broad Universe. All I was doing was running up stats on gender distribution in the science-fiction/fantasy/horror field: how many authors were male, female, or undetermined, and of those, how many were acknowledged with reviews, “Recommended” or “Notable” listings, and so on. (If you’re a female writer, the results would depress you. 🙁 ) I often had to look up the author to be certain of his/her gender. It didn’t take long to realize that if I wanted to find information about an author, and s/he didn’t have either a Wikipedia entry or an author’s website that had a guessable domain name or came up in a Google/Yahoo search, I was (a) SOOL and (b) very frustrated. Then I thought unkind (and probably unfair) thoughts about the writer and how serious s/he was about writing if s/he couldn’t even buy a domain name. Then it occurred to me that undoubtedly, anyone else looking for an author online by their name–editors, agents, other writers, journalists, reviewers, etc–would react exactly the way I did if information wasn’t fast and easy to find.
It’s true, I’m all over the Internet, and if you Google my name, you’ll find By Light Unseen Media, “Real Vampires,” Mortal Touch and lots more. I’m the only Inanna Arthen on earth! But I decided I needed an author website that focused on my fiction and writing. Among other things, I want BLUM’s website to look like a small press website, not about me. I put an author bio up for Anne Fraser as part of that change.
So, I bought up inannaarthen.com and a bunch of other domain names. Trouble is–that’s the cheap part. Hosting a website is expensive. I already pay $14.95 per month to host bylightunseenmedia.com, and that’s the lowest rate my ISP offers. There are cheaper hosting options, but even they add up when it’s a monthly fee. My monthly fees have gone up as it is, with the upgrade in my phone service, and fuel costs driving everything else up. Even first-class stamps just went up another cent.
But, I discovered that I can forward iannnaarthen.com and vampiresofnewengland.com to a dedicated subdirectory of BLUM’s website. At least if someone types those domains into their browser nav bar, they’ll go to the right place. That is…they will, as soon as I design and upload The Right Place. I underestimated how much work that was going to be!
Of course, I wanted it to look nice. Not slick and Flash-animated or anything, just tidy–and immediately different from BLU and BLUM. So, I needed a color scheme. I needed to design a header graphic. I needed to figure out the page layout. I had to decide how to organize the information, and what information was important. I’ve spent hours looking at author websites linked on the Broad Universe Member page. They’re all so different! I’ve never done a website that was intended to promote just, you know, me. All my websites have been informational sites.
I decided to completely convert my least-used Blogger.com blog into an author/writing blog. BLU Media Blog is for publishing stuff. I had this blog I started for political commentary, but I never posted there, so I renamed it and moved it onto BLUM’s server. But now it has to be re-designed, too! It has to match the author pages.
So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two days or so…ye gods, what a time sink web design is! And I haven’t even done style sheets for the revised sites–I want to, but that’s even more time! The new material isn’t all uploaded yet–I hope it will be up by tonight. I just wanted to make an update here before any more time went by.