Time. Money. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not think about them, having neither in any great excess. But, unfortunately, they're pretty important when you're thinking about your website. So, let's finish up the planning stage of building your website by thinking about each.
6. How much time do you have or are you willing to spend on maintaining your website?
Think carefully about this. It doesn't matter if you just have a few minutes a week or a couple of hours a day. But you need to know in advance before you consider how your website will work, what it's going to contain and what you can achieve.
Everything takes longer than you expect on a website. Even if you have a really well-designed website, created on a user-friendly content management system (more about this later), it's still going to take longer than you thought.
( Finish reading about planning your website )
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Okay, I was going to talk today about time and money, but it occurred to me that there was one more topic that I should cover in planning before those, so you get to avoid worrying about time and money for another day. Today's topic:
5. What outcomes do you want to achieve with your website?
In other words, What's the point?
What's the point of your website. By now, you've probably decided to have a website, or that you might want a website in the future. But why?
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Okay, back to business.
If you haven't been following this series of blog entries about how to build websites for writers, the earlier entries are here:
Today I want to talk about the impression your website makes. 4. What impression do you want to give to visitors?By this stage, you should have identified who your target audience are and what they are looking for when they come to your site. The next stage is to consider what impression you want to give them.
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Suddenly, in the space of just a few days, it has turned into a beautiful early summer.
Maya and I have just come back from a long walk. The woods are thick with bluebells and flowering wild garlic. Ferns are unrolling in the shade. All the trees have new, light-green leaves that let the sunlight speckle through.
In a field, we saw hares playing. One of them ran up to within ten feet of us before turning tail and racing off.
This kind of weather makes me happy.
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| 2008-05-08 16:57 |
| This is nothing to do with websites... |
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| battle cry |
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Anyone find that, I dunno, a bit much of an innuendo?
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I started this series of blog entries on websites for writers with an introduction, then I talked about whether you needed a website. In the last entry, I looked at identifying your target audience. If you're following along, trying to plan out a website, then you should make sure you've identified that audience before you go on to this next stage.
3. What are your audience looking for when they come to your website?
In the last journal entry, I said you would need to remember that the audience for your website is not you. One of the biggest mistakes most people make when they put together a website is that they think, 'What do I want on my website?'
This is the wrong question. You should be asking what your target audience is looking for.
People go to a website with specific questions or ideas about what they want to find out. If you don't give them that, they will leave, and you'll have lost them for good. For the most part, the idea of people 'surfing' the internet--randomly travelling from site to site, without a purpose--is a myth. Your visitors, particularly your target audience, want something from you, and it's your job to give it to them.
( Read more about planning your website )
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In the last journal entry, I talked about whether you need a website or not. If you're still reading, I assume you think you might. Now let's really start to plan out your website. As always, feel free to ask questions, argue, comment or whatever.
2. Who is the target audience for your website?
When I ask this question, most people say 'everyone' or come up with a vast, diverse list of audiences. Your audience isn't everyone. It can't even be lots of different groups.
You can't appeal to everyone with a website. If you try, it will fail. Just as your stories can't appeal to every reader, neither can your website.
Likewise, your audience isn't you. Although few people would answer the question with 'Me', that's what a lot of people seem to think. When you're deciding, as you will later, what to include, how to write it and what your site should look like, you need to keep this in mind. Your website is for your visitors, not for you.
( Read more about planning your website )
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Okay, you're a writer. Writers have websites. You've probably seen them, or someone's told you should have one. You've got hold of a copy of website editing program like Dreamweaver, or you read a book about HTML, or you know someone who made a website for a friend or colleague. You're all ready to go, to build your website and be part of the web, because... Well, because...
To be honest, it's possible you don't quite know why. And even if you do know why, you may well not know what you want to do with your website when you've got it.
This is pretty normal.
It's very tempting to launch yourself into designing and building your website straight away, but if you do, it will go wrong. The time you spend planning will pay itself back later on. So, for now, no designs, no content. Let's just think about your website.
If you've already decided that, for whatever reason, you do need or want a website, you can skip the rest of this entry and move right on to the next one (coming up shortly), where we'll start to plan out your website in detail. If you're not sure, continue reading here…
( Read about planning your website )
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Advance Warning: Sometimes, we just have to indulge our obsessions. One of mine is websites. I've managed to hold off for a while now, but no longer! I'm going to post a series of entries on how you go about planning, building and maintaining a successful website. Particularly a writer's website. If you have no interest in any of this, just skip on past any entries that start with 'Websites for Writers', including this one. I'm sure I'll manage some other entries in between.
( Read about websites for writers )
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1. We've had two beautiful early-summer days, on Friday and Saturday, all warm and green and sunny. Sadly, the weather gods noticed, and now they have turned their baleful eyes upon us. It's raining again.
2. The word 'sassy' is now officially banned from the English language. Please don't use it anymore.
3. My novel still will not end. 85k and counting. No more dragons either.
Tell me three Sunday things.
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My novel, which is provisionally called Dragons of Mars, finally has a dragon in it. We first see the dragon at 72,910 words in. For context, this book was originally going to be 60k.
Oh, and the dragon is dead.
Still... Dragon!!! At last!!!
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In the March 15th issue of New Scientist, I read the following:
Since 2004, EmSense, a company based in Monterey, California, has been using biofeedback to help game designers evaluate new products. Testers play a game wearing EmSense's headset, which uses an EEG to record their brainwaves, and also measures their heart rate and the sweatiness of their skin. EmSense then builds up a blow-by-blow profile of the player's emotional state and levels of arousal during play so the game can be made more engaging. And it occured to me that exactly the same could be done for books. Here's what I envisage: Find a group made up of your target audience (in my case, probably 12-year-old boys), give them a headset and a copy of your book, and then measure their responses to the book, page-by-page or even paragraph-by-paragraph. You could find out exactly how they were responding to what you'd written, which bits were exciting, funny, boring, slow. You could then revise accordingly. Okay, you'd need some way of monitoring what they were reading, but some kind of camera could do that fairly easily. So, how does that sound to you as a writer? Is the idea that you might be so closely forced to follow the reactions of a small group a complete nightmare? Something appalling that could be used to turn you into a machine rather than an artist? Or does it sound like a really useful tool that could give the kind of honest, detailed, unbiased feedback that you could never hope to get from a critiquer? Someone, someday is going to decide to use this for books, if they haven't already. Would you be willing?
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First. I am proud of this. See, it might seem a little weirdly obsessive, but here's what I've been doing with my novel: I've set up an Excel spreadsheet that I use to enter the running total word count. The spreadsheet then calculates the number of words done that day and the weekly rolling average, and plots these on a graph. I realise this is strange behaviour, and it's not what I'm proud of. What I'm proud of is that I've finally got the weekly rolling average up to 1,000 words for the first time. Taking into account that Mondays and Tuesdays are full work days for me and so a bit of a write-off for writing, I'm pretty pleased by it. And it looks good on the graph.
Second. I have managed to give myself whiplash in the neck by stretching. This morning, I stretched back and then came forward too quickly, and I now have whiplash. I'm trying not to turn my neck. Is this the most pathetic way to injure oneself or what?
Third. I've just sold a reprint (republish?) of my Realms of Fantasy story, The Land of Reeds, to Pseudopod. It's a fantasy set in ancient Egypt, and I pity the poor reader who is going to have to pronounce all the ancient Egyptian names and words. Not that anyone could really say they got it wrong, I guess. This is my third sale to Pseudopod. I like this podcasting thing. :)
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| 2008-04-04 16:30 |
| Three quick entries about writing: Three: In which I feel sympathy for fat-fantasy writers. |
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I think I finally understand what happened to Robert Jordan. I understand why he had so much trouble reaching the end of his 'Wheel of Time' series. I understand why George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire keeps getting longer. I understand this because I am trapped in The Book That Will Not End. Every time I think I'm about to make progress, something else happens to complicate it and put the end further back, like Alice, running as fast as possible without getting any closer to the end. Now one of my characters has been bitten by a Martian slug thing, and that's going to add a whole slew of new words. And I can absolutely guarantee that, by the time I through those, a new complication will have arrived.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's good stuff. I wouldn't be writing it if I didn't. It's the right thing to do. It's what stories are.
But. It. Will. Not. End.
P.S. 'Fat-fantasy authors' in the title? These are authors of fat fantasies, right? Not fantasy authors who are fat. Good. Glad we cleared that up. (Not that I don't feel sympathy for fantasy authors who are fat, having put on a few pounds myself in recent years...)
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| 2008-04-04 16:26 |
| Three quick entries on writing: Two: In which I have to be hit over the head to realise the obvious. |
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Steph sent me a fantastic link the other day. It's a blog entry by Mary Hershey about going to an author event by Elizabeth Gilbert. In the Q&A, Gilbert was asked about her intention when writing her bestselling novel Eat, Pray, Love. She revealed that she had written the book for a single friend, quite literally. She had been advised by her younger sister to write to one reader, and she'd taken that advice literally. In every part of her book, she'd written it as though she was writing an extended letter to her friend. She'd decided what to say and how to say it based on how best to explain it to that individual friend.
I'd never thought about writing in this way before, but it makes perfect sense. I've heard authors talk about writing books for themselves, and I've thought in terms of writing for an audience (in fact, this was the very first blog entry I ever did, back in a long-lost blog), but I've never focused it as though I was writing for a single, real person that I actually knew. Doing so makes a lot of sense. Writing is being about being specific rather than generic. We describe the singular rather than the generic when describing a scene ('we passed a sharp-sided valley', for example, rather than, 'we passed sharp-sided valleys'). We write an individual character rather than writing about 'a boy' or 'a girl'. It makes sense to extend this to the book's audience, too.
In fact, how often have you heard authors tell how they wrote a book for their kid or kids and read it to them as they wrote it? When you write for that very specific, individual audience rather than for an undefined mass, it will always be more consistent, accurate and focused. I know this. I knew this. But I may have only finally realised this when the blog entry hit me over the head with it.
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| 2008-04-04 16:26 |
| Three quick entries on writing: One: In which my smugness doesn’t last long. |
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Just the other day, I gave Steph some good writing advice and felt very smug about it. Something had happened to one of Steph's characters and she (the character, that is, not Steph) was overcome by wild magic. So I advised Steph not to cure the character straight away. Curing the character would have been easier for the story. It would have enabled the protagonist to get on with what had to happen. But it would have been the wrong thing to do. Keeping the character 'infected' is going to cause all sorts of complications and difficulties for the protag (and for Steph). It's going to get in the way of smooth flow of plot. But it's going to be a whole lot more fun. Nalo Hopkinson referred to this as 'going there'. If you've got something difficult that's going to happen and your instinct is not to do it, you should absolutely do it. Go there. Don't back away.
So, now we fast forward to today. In my book, one of my characters has been bitten by a Martian critter and is unconscious. But I need to get my characters out of the Martian wilderness pretty quickly so I can get to the end of the book. My instinct was to let the character recover straight away. Steph pointed out to me that that was the easy out. But it wasn’t the most fun or dramatic. It wasn't 'going there'.
Suddenly, I was feeling a whole lot less smug.
It's amazing how many books don't 'go there'. A character is about to be kidnapped, but then the baddies fail. The character is about to be robbed, but they manage not to be. They are about to get lost, but then they find the way.
It's not dramatic. It doesn't make the book better. Obstacles have to cause real problems. They have to have consequences or they're not real obstacles. Now I shall tattoo that to the backs of my hands and I may even remember it.
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It takes me forever to get my characters anywhere these days.
For example, it's just taken me almost 8,000 words to crash my airship. This would be okay if I was writing Fat FantasyTM, but this is supposed to be a kids' book. There was a time when 8,000 words would have been a substantial proportion of one of my books.
Now I've dropped my characters in the middle of the Martian wilderness, hundreds of miles from where they're supposed to be, and I have no idea how they're going to get where they're going. Nor how many words it's going to take to get them there.
One day, I expect to write a novel in which no one manages to get anywhere at all. ;)
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Via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) stephanieburgis, who gave me the letter "B", here's my attempt at the Letter Meme that's going around. These are my top ten favorite things that start with "B", in no particular order. If you want to play, leave a comment and I will give you a letter.
1. Border Collies (Border Collie mixes) . I never guessed that border collie mixes would be my favourite type of dogs, until I met Steph and she introduced me to Nika. Now I wouldn’t have any other type of dog. Border Collie mixes are enormously intelligent, playful, loving, loyal and fun. Nika converted me to them, and now Maya has confirmed it.
2. Bears. The ancient Finns believed the bear was the spirit of their forefathers. Koreans traditionally believe the bear is their ancestor. Most bears are shy and gentle, and will only attack humans to protect their cubs. There is something inexplicably grand about bears, the way they move and hold themselves, and there’s also something very human about them, no doubt the source of the many human-bear legends. Sadly, bears are also used in traditional Chinese medicine, meaning that many thousands are held in captivity for the appalling practice of ‘bile farming’, where the bears are farmed solely for their bile glands.
3. Behind the Rules. Steph’s short story, which is now available online at Escape Pod.
( Keep reading the rest of the letter 'B' )
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| 2008-03-27 17:25 |
| At last! |
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Okay, I've been working on my website redesign for what seems like ages now, but at last I've done it (some minor bugs in various versions of internet explorer notwithstanding). Here it is:
http://www.patricksamphire.com/
That's it!
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You all know, because you read Steph's journal (not because I told you, because I didn't) that we went to Eastercon at the weekend. We had a great time. It's always a bit dangerous naming who you met at a con, because you end up missing out someone you spent five hours talking to one evening, and then they're upset and the next time they have the opportunity to pull you out of burning wreckage, they don't, because you snubbed them on livejournal.
Anyway, cons are about meeting people, and that's pretty much what we did most of the time. (Yes, I know there are rumours that cons are about panels and readings and suchlike, but I try to never listen to rumours.) It was cool to meet people I'd only talked to or seen online before, like aliettedb , splinister and alankria, to catch up with people we've met at cons before, like Martin Owton, Freda Warrington, Geoff Ryman and Gary Couzens, and to meet new people, like ethereal_lad, palecast, Gaie Sebold and many others.
I did actually do a few con things. The panel on mythology with Neil Gaiman, Sarah Singleton, Maura McHugh and Liz Williams (along with a fifth panelist whose name I have, embarrassingly, forgotten) was pretty interesting, although I thought some of the questioners were rather stuck on the idea that there is a single, canonical version of each myth, which of course is nonsense and kind of missed the point. Charlie Stross did a really interesting techy guest of honour talk, which excited me about science fiction for the first time for ages, so much so that I went straight out and bought one of his novels. Neil Gaiman's guest of honour speech was highly entertaining, as always, and I loved the opening of his soon-to-be-released novel that he read. The talk on common physics mistakes in SF was immense fun in a very geeky way that suited me down to the ground. And Mitch Benn's concert was hilarious (check out his latest song on youtube).
The best part, though, was hanging out and chatting with people. When you're a writer, you spend a lot of time working on your own and feeling like what you're doing happens in a vacuum. When you go to a convention and find all those other people who are doing the same, who care about the same things and who have been through the same experiences, it's immensely energising.
Of course, even though it was great fun, we were desperate to get home and save Maya from the kennels where she'd had to stay. She does not like kennels, and we don't like leaving her there. I think she hardly ate or slept over the weekend, and she has pretty much collapsed with exhaustion ever since we picked her up. Right now, she's curled up behind me on the chair, asleep, making me perch right on the edge of the chair while I type this. But she's happy to be home, and we're just as happy to be back with her.
And, if I missed you off the list above, it's just because I'm crap at remembering names and faces, not because I'm snubbing you, so please pull me out of any burning wreckage you might happen to pass.
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