Friday, September 26, 2008

Author Websites and Blogs

How important is a website and a blog for an author? I always thought it was very important and thus I have both. For a long time now, my blog's been a lot prettier than my website. Of course, I purchased a cute design from a real designer for my blog and I tried to make my own website. Unfortunately, I'm not the artist or the computer geke in our family (yes, we have both). I finally broke down and hired the same design company to design a unique design for my blog. We've been having a devil of a time getting it to post, however. I hope it was up in time for my September 22nd release of "Heart and Soul" at TEB. I hope it's at least up by today (I'm pre-posting and pre-scheduling). Both DS#1 and my web designer have worked above and beyond the call to get my new site up. Since I'm not a computer techie or designer I don't understand why there's been a problem, just that there is one. Check out www.ashleyladd.com and let me know what you think. I love it. I wish I could do art like that. I'll have to content myself with writing. I segued. Let me return to my original premise. One friend mentioned that her publisher told her she really needed to have a MySpace page. I just read an agent's blog and he said that it would be good for authors to have these things but that it just needs to have minimal information and look professional, but not necessarily fancy. How important do you think it is for an author to have a website? A blog? A MySpace page? What do you think?

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post Ashley, and the site looks great by the way.

I too have been told by many people how important it is to have a website. And I love mine too. But no one ever goes there. I can go weeks at a time without a single hit to dakotarebel.com. So I really don't know why it's so important if readers aren't even visiting.

I will say that my blog appears to be pretty popular and gets MANY more hits than the website. Though, I can't say it translates at all to sales, as they have stayed pretty stagnant.

XoXoXo
Dakota Rebel

Anonymous said...

That would be the blog when I say your site is beautiful.

Sorry. I can't seem to get onto your website at all.

Dakota

barbara huffert said...

I copy/paste my blogspot blog to my myspace blog because according to the counters I have more people who read it consistently there than on blogspot. Does anyone actually read my books? No idea.

Unknown said...

I couldn't get into your site...as for what you should and should not have I think that's up to the indiviual writer.

Unknown said...

My son's still trying to get my ashleyladd.com site up. I'm getting very frustrated but I know he's trying and that my son's had a lousy week - that's a few blogs in itself. So hopefully soon I can announce that my ashleyladd.com site is back up, new, and improved.

Anny Cook said...

I get hits everyday on my website. Some days more than others. But I especially get hits when I post excerpts on the different loops because I ALWAYS make sure that my website is at the bottom of the excerpt. Sometimes I get hits from comments left at blogs. So I think it's kind of where the person is "hanging out" so to speak.

Website Content and Copy: Ashley Ladd, 2008.|Blog Design by JudithShakes Designs.
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