My website has needed updating for a long time. Now that it’s been inexplicably down for a week, it’s probably broken enough to move up the priority list and get done. Yay? Well, yes, yay, because maintaining my website is one of the many kindnesses Dan does for me, and he’s excited about trying some new things. His explanations of the things get very technical very quickly, so I just say thank you a lot and try not to get in the way.
What are the most important things to change about it? It needs to be faster, so some of the lovely design elements that Deena Fisher put in for me back in the days of Drollerie Press will have to get swapped out for something else. It needs some free reads and exerpts. Dan has some ideas about calendars that sound complicated and time consuming, but we’ll see. From my side of things, the highest priorities are to build a mailing list, and to come up with a newsletter people will be delighted to receive. If you’re on any authors’ mailing lists and like what you get, or check in regularly with any authors’ websites, please tell me what works for you as a reader.
The timing for my website’s temporary collapse is lucky. I was just about to start spreading the word about a reading for the Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic anthology that was supposed to happen in NYC next month. I’d been kicking myself for not publicizing the reading more, but first there was the concussion, and then we all got sick (like, 104.4 degree fever sick), and by the time I emerged from my cave again, blinking like a mole again, the reading was cancelled.
(My winter is some kind of Groundhog Day joke waiting to coalesce. On February 2nd, I’m going to step out of my front door, and if I see my shadow and scurry back inside, we’ll have six more weeks of revision. If I bumble out into the sun, we can forecast six weeks of gregarious Kickstarter preparations.)
On the one hand, I’m disappointed, because readings at the KGB Bar are a big deal. On the other hand, it was going to cost a small fortune in babysitting money to cover my absence from home for an entire weekday, to say nothing of gas and tolls from DC to Manhattan. Our odds of selling enough books for it to be a break-even proposition in financial terms were not great. In non-monetary terms, well, sometimes you don’t know until years later what was important. Maybe something wonderful would have come of it. Now some different wonderful thing will happen instead.
If the different wonderful thing has a word count of its own, so much the better. And now, back to work on it.
Source: Dr Pretentious
