About

What we do

Website design — and redesign! — including:

  • blogs
  • forums
  • photo galleries
  • contests
  • mailing lists
  • visitor statistics
  • search engine optimization
  • central control panel for quick access to accounts

All of our designs are standards-compliant, CSS-based, accessible, and search engine friendly. Whenever possible, we include blogs or basic content management systems in our redesign plans. It’s important to us to make it easy for authors to update their own sites.

Reputation monitoring

  • email or RSS notifications of book reviews and mentions in blogs

Event promotion

  • promoting appearances online
  • RSVPs

In addition to the usual web design services, we’re throwing in some extras: helping authors stay on top of reader discussions and finding ways to promote their appearances online. There are lots of free web tools that let people do these things, but we don’t see many authors taking advantage of them. Our motivation is entirely selfish: as readers, we wish it were easier to keep up with our favorite authors.

Domains and Hosting

We do not host sites ourselves. We think there are plenty of great, cheap web hosts that do it way better than we could. We also believe it’s important for authors to retain ownership of their sites and domains; we’ve seen some strange situations arise when someone else — be it the designer, the publisher, or a fan — owns everything. We will help set up accounts, but we’ll never put them in our name or hold someone’s data hostage.

Free Advice

We’ll post a lot of tips for authors who prefer to develop their own sites. Once a week1 we’ll also post a new entry in our series, 50 ways your website is not helping you sell more novels. Alas, each entry in this series is based on a true story.

We’ll also evaluate existing sites. We’ll look at the underlying code as well as the graphic design and see if the site is efficient, effective, and user friendly — and if not, we’ll suggest ways to improve it.

Why we do it

We are all avid readers and web surfers. We have seen good sites and bad sites. We have watched as time passed sites by. We’ve seen authors struggle with what to put on their sites, how to build them, and where to host them.

We have seen a lot of authors pay too much money for bad websites.

We want to bring affordable, well designed and manageable websites to authors.

Who we are

Stephanie Leary
Steph has worked as a web designer for various parts of the Texas A&M University System for a few years now, and has recently moved to the University Writing Center. She spends a large chunk of her day pestering her colleagues about CSS and accessible design. In her copious spare time, she’s writing her first fourteen novels simultaneously. For a laugh, ask her how that’s going.

Sarah Schroeder Stanley
Sarah can’t decide on what her last name should be, and enjoys learning new and spiffy things about web design. Sarah’s a Pro member of RWA.

1 At the moment, we’re up to #35 and we’re taking a break. We’ll resume the series soon.

Elsewhere

News on author websites, blogging, and book promotion

GoDaddy, the domain registrar we often use, has a $1.99 special right now. The trick to registering with GoDaddy is to ignore all the extra junk they try to sell you after you start the checkout process. Look for links or buttons that say “No, thanks” or “Continue with checkout.” Caveat: if you don’t have a PO Box and you don’t want your address and phone number becoming public, you might want to add private registration. ✽

Overwhelmed by online social networks? Unclutter! ✽

Evite Alternatives (via Kat Richardson) ✽

Agent Colleen Lindsay is running a great series on book promotion on her blog. ✽

While we were on vacation last week, agent Nathan Bransford wrote a couple of great posts on author websites and how authors’ blogs influence book sales. There’s some great info in the comments, although there’s also some misinformation about technical issues. (Feel free to ask us about those!) ✽

In the early 21st century, which comes first: the book or the blog? ✽

What makes a good blog? ✽

Text Prefs — a U.K. design firm is conducting a survey on how people like to read onscreen text. Tell them how you like it! They’ve promised to publish the findings so we can all do better at designing things people read. ✽

How to work with a designer and a publicist. ✽

100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media — great overview of how to use the various social media sites to promote yourself. Password management is key here, since you could be signing up for a dozen services or more. Make a spreadsheet! (via our colleague, Jeremy Tolbert) ✽

More »