Day 2 – An Author’s Website

Today I realized that some of the work I’d done for the An Author’s Life segment on my website was done incorrectly. I’m nothing if not a genius. After getting my writing done today, word count at the bottom of this post, I had to go back and fix what I’d done. It wasn’t a monumental task or anything, but the way I’ve set up my website, and its navigation, makes updating it with future posts a breeze.

Let me explain.

If you navigate to the Final Guys section of my site, you’ll see all the posts I’ve made regarding the podcast there. I didn’t add those to that section. When I create a new post on my site, I get to pick what category it belongs to. When I do that, my site automatically drops it into the right section. It looks pretty good and it makes my life easier. It should also make it simple for everyone to find the different projects I work on without having to scroll through dozens or hundreds of blog posts. If you want to read all the posts in An Author’s Life, you just follow the link on the homepage.

I don’t want to pretend that I have the best site in the world, but compared to most authors, this place is a home run. I get it – most of us are artsy types and don’t know much about webdesign. I don’t know a lot either. But I think a nice site can help you sell books. It definitely helps me.

Without going into a ton of details and step-by-step crap, I’ll give you an overview of what I’m doing here. I use a self-hosted WordPress site. This is something you can set up through GoDaddy or a lot of other hosts. It isn’t that difficult to get going, but there are tons of guides online to help if you feel lost.

The WordPress theme I use, which is what customizes the site and makes it look purdy, is Themify Parallax. The theme is what allows me to have the categories automatically drop in different sections of the site in a purdy way. Getting everything looking the way I wanted took a lot of time, but I had a lot of content I needed to move around. If you’re just starting out, it probably wouldn’t be that bad. I’m sure there are newer themes that make it easier too. I built this site several years ago.

My website is also where I host my newsletter signup page. I’ll go more in-depth on this at a later date. This page has made a huge difference in my business. Every author needs a newsletter. It’s a game changer. I use Mailchimp, but I’m sure there are cheaper options out there.

That’s an awful lot of information without providing much actual help.

Enough of that boring stuff. Readers want word counts. Today I wrote 2042 words in Decayed (The Hunger #5), bringing the total to 59435. That’s one more word that I put down yesterday. That wasn’t on purpose, but it’s a product of the process I use to write. More on that tomorrow, probably.

So there you go. Lots of useless drivel about why my website is decent.

 

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