Monthly Archives: April 2012

You Need a Website

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It’s true—you do need a website. We can debate what form the site takes—a static site, a blog, something else—but you need a presence on the web where people can find more information about you and your work.

If I can’t find them online, my gut reaction is that they’re not really professionals yet. This doesn’t mean you need to blog all the time…but you should at least have an online presence with a little bio and links to your published works. You can make one for free, and it’ll take you an hour. This is 2012. Get a damn website.”

~James Sutter, 9 Ways to Piss Off an Editor

And if you have a site, it should be professional. It only benefits you to make it so.

What do we mean by professional?

It should be appealing.
Perhaps even better stated: don’t turn off your visitor. Too often sites are built without any real considerations for the viewer—there’s no sense of a color scheme, of how graphics should be implemented, how to properly handle graphics, where to place content and navigation…it’s just a mess (and sometimes makes our eyes bleed). First impressions do matter. You will lose most of your viewers within a few seconds if your site looks horrible.

It should be easy to read.
Not all sites are about textual content, but as BookLifeNow.com is focused on writers we will assume your site is (we’ll tackle online portfolios and art driven sites in a later article). As such, you want people to read what you’ve written—that should be the goal of any writer—and you can help your chances by making this easy. Font choices, font sizing, color, contrast, and clarity all come into play here. If in doubt, stick to the basics: darker text on a lighter background, away from graphics, and using standard “reading” fonts—no script type, no comic sans, nothing too big or too small.

It should be easy to navigate.
If you’ve managed to get a visitor to your site you probably would like to keep them there for a while. This is where navigation comes into play—it’s what we all use to move from page to page, from one bit of content to another. Make sure your navigation is logical, well organized, and not overloaded to the point your visitor does not know where to begin.

It should look modern.
This one is a bit tricky and not one to over-stress about. You don’t have to chase after trends (rounded corners or square, drop-shadows or not) but you should keep in mind that tastes (as well as technology) change and it doesn’t take too many years before a website can look dated. Plan on refreshing your site every few years or so.

It should be modern—code wise.
As stated before technology changes and your site should reflect this. There’s a wide range of browsers out there, running on a wide range of devices, and your site should function on as many places as possible. If you put your site up when Internet Explorer 6 was all the rage, your website is a dinosaur.

We recently redesigned the BookLifeNow.com site and took all of these into consideration. Of course we wanted to rebrand the site, to put our own mark on it (while retaining a few design elements that tied back to what it was), but more importantly we wanted the site to be useable. This means high readability, navigation that’s easy to find and click-through, and taking advantage of the latest in webdev technology—all while making the site visually appealing.

Plus we had a fun time doing it.

Your website is an indispensable tool and it should be given the same amount of attention you wish from your visitors. We custom-designed our site because we have that capability, but you don’t have to—there are a myriad of solutions at your disposal, many of which are easy and accessible. Over the coming months we will revisit this topic in greater detail, as well as discussing other options you may encounter: static sites versus CMS-driven, custom design versus themes, self-built or ready-made, using friends or family versus hiring a designer/developer, search engine optimization and how to get more visitors. We won’t help you learn HTML or become a web designer, but we will provide guidance to these and other considerations—no matter your skill or experience level.

Note: both Galen Dara and Bear Weiter contributed to this article.

Liz Gorinsky on Her Hugo Nomination, Interview by Jeff VanderMeer

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Recently, Jeff VanderMeer interviewed Liz Gorinsky about her recent Hugo nomination for Best Editor, Long Form.

Jeff VanderMeer: What does it mean to you to be up for a Hugo in the long form editor
category, given that book editors rarely get any public honors?

Liz Gorinsky: It is incredibly weird, though now that it’s happened a few times, it’s beginning to feel slightly less unreal. On one hand, editing is an odd thing to get acclaim for, given that the meat of the editorial process — as removed from the publishing process, which is considerably more public — is done in private: It’s you and the manuscript you’re deciding whether to buy, or you and the author and a pile of tracked changes, both of which are invisible to the reader if you’ve done your job right. On the other hand, once you accept that Hugo voters are interested in giving an award for that work, there are so many people who have been at it for decades longer than me that I’m amazed (and slightly baffled, and immensely grateful) that so many people thought to put my name down.

JVM: What do you think excellence in long-form editing means? In terms of what qualities must an acquiring editor who handles developmental edits have?

LG: Given the aforementioned invisibility, I have to presume that most of the Hugo nominating population is basing their selection on the merits of the books an editor has acquired, or on the editor’s public works and persona. These are both important parts of the job, but they
constitute a tiny fraction of an in-house editor’s day-to-day workload. Then there’s the actual claws-out editing of books, which is just another small section of the job, but–since it’s my favorite part — I like to pretend is what all the hubub is about. But I don’t think there’s a concrete set of qualities an editor must have. Every book is different, and every book teaches you what it needs, be it a large swath of developmental edits or a meticulous line-by-line polish. And at least half the trick of editing is knowing what to leave alone.

JVM: Are there any role models or other editors you have found particularly inspirational personally?

LG: Obviously most of my mentors are the folks I’ve worked for and with at Tor: Anna Genoese and Jim Minz, who ran the internship program that introduced me to book editing and answered countless questions; Jim Frenkel, who I assisted for six or seven years; Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who I still do; and Tom Doherty, who’s made an immeasurable diference to the way the field looks today. In terms of inspiration, though, I’d cite Juliet Ulman, whose sensibilities are eerily close to mine, and Gavin Grant and Kelly Link, whose Small Beer Press seems to me like a fantasy storybook version of what a publishing house should be.

Many thanks to Liz Gorinsky for her time, and congratulations on her well-deserved nomination!

On Rebranding a Known Property

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I met Jeff VanderMeer over Greek food, during his tour for the release of Booklife. He personalized the two books I bought with sketches. We all went to a bar and I had a great conversation with his dad before driving the three hours back home, at midnight. I chalked it up to the ‘that was fun’ category and went back to writing.

At the time, I had no idea I would end up doing freelance publicity for him, or good-naturedly threatening him with pandas. All I knew was that he knew what the hell he was talking about and had some really interesting stories about cockroaches. When I started actually working as a publicist though, he was one of my first clients, through Raw Dog Screaming Press. I was working on Monstrous Creatures, one of his non-fiction collections.

My first real brush with the Booklife experience came last year at FogCon, about 2 years after I met Jeff. We wanted to put together a mini-workshop for Booklife for con attendees. We terrified the coffee shop where the workshop was held, cramming 15+ people around one table and commencing very strange discussions. Listening to them discuss how to take the maddening, sanity-destroying world of writing and manage it, even enjoy it, was like three years of on-the-ground experience wrapped up into one neat package. We talked about some things to do with the Booklife brand, but due to busy lives, they fell through at the time.

In January, Morgan emailed me saying, “Jeff has offered us the Booklife website and brand. They’ve got the Weird website stuff going on, and Booklife needs someone else to keep it growing.”

We worked things out with Jeff, and started brainstorming how to do the old incarnation justice, but also how to take it to the next step in its evolution.

How did we do that?

  1. We created a long-running plan. We didn’t just immediately open up and start posting whatever. We debated what we wanted to offer as a group. Long email chains formed on everything from what content we’d post the first week to the choice of website colors. (We finally settled on the colors when Lily, our resident synesthete, said everything tasted good.)
  2. The website was redesigned. We took many elements from the original site and married them to Galen Dara’s unique art style. Jacob and Marlyse rebuilt it to make it clean and easy, and, most importantly, fresh.
  3. Steve and I collaborated on a press release that would go out to select members of the community. This gives us the opportunity to express the changes, as well as inform that we’re open for business again.
  4. I actually came up with a catchy slogan! “Booklife gave you the platform. Booklife Now is your expansion kit.” It’s short, memorable, and perfectly expresses our plans.
  5. We planned content. Knowing where we’re going is half the battle in ensuring that we remain focused and unique.
  6. We defined staff roles, and made sure we had a variety of people.

Now, of course, there are hundreds of little details I’m not mentioning. But in six steps, we took an existing product and made it our own, without losing the history and uniqueness of the existing product.

You see, it’s great to take on an existing brand, especially one as well-known and loved as Booklife. It already has fans, and we’ll be able to tap into an existing market. But at the same time, we won’t be able to carbon-copy what Jeff and his group did. Besides that, we need to be able to show it as a new thing. It’s like rebooting a comic book character: try not to piss off all of the fans, but still offer a fresh new face.

On Community

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The image of a writer clad in unkempt clothing, hunched over a keyboard for hours on end is as familiar a cliché as it is truthful. The art of creation is a solitary one. Whether you call your source the muse or the word machine, the stories are created by your time and effort while the world rushes by outside.

Yet humans have a need to belong. A need for community. Writers are no different. In fact, I’d argue the fact that writers have an even greater need for community because of the isolation of the profession. Certainly, many of us are introverts, but, contrary to popular belief, introverts are not antisocial. At least, not always.

Having just returned from my first convention I can say unequivocally that if you can attend one, you should. Being in a room of like-minded individuals provides a sense of belonging and camaraderie, but you can also sit in on panels and learn from industry professionals. Hearing their experiences and advice is invaluable, and never underestimate the power of making connections, no matter if you have one book published, none, or dozens.

I will be honest. Introducing myself to strangers and making small talk are not among my strengths. I fight self-doubt and fear the entire time. (What if I sound like an idiot? What if I can’t remember their name later?) But I found myself doing both more than once at the convention. I can’t say it got any easier, but no one laughed in my face and called me a hack, so that’s something.

Which brings me to my next point: We are all on the same side. Writing is not a competition. Writers are not pitted against each other for a single coveted spot on a bookstore shelf, and one writer’s success does not mean another writer’s failure. Meeting other industry pros helps drive this home. We all have strengths and weakness, we all have doubts, but at the end of the day, we are all part of something larger than just our desk and chair.

If you can’t attend something in person, social media’s greatest gift is the ability to step outside your locale and connect with others all over the world. Don’t be afraid to reach out and say hello on forums, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and so on. If you are an established author, it will give your fans a way of connecting with you. If you are a new writer, it will help other industry folks put a face to your name.

Writing may indeed be a solitary profession, but gone are the days of isolation. With that being said, you can remain a silent figure behind a curtain if you wish, but if you choose to take a step outside, the community you’ll find is one of genuine support and friendship.