Hello RWA Conference Friends!
I’m about to give a talk on Creating a Web Presence and barely had the presence of mind (ha) to write a post on the subject. Luckily I’m giving the talk with the detail-oriented, brilliant, witty, darling, nose-pierced lovely known as Emma Clair, who would kill me if I didn’t at least write one little post on the subject. Nothing like a healthy fear of death to inspire a late-night blog post.
First off - for those of you who are about to attend, or who have already attended our workshop, the handouts and supplementary materials from the workshop are available over at Emma’s site.
I’m not going to try to recreate our talk in this post, but I’ll say this: you don’t need to know much about the web to have a website, or a blog, or both. You also don’t need more than about $8/year* to have a site of your own. And it’s really, truly, honestly not hard. Go to Wordpress.com** and sign up for a free blog (even if what you really want is a website and not a blog). Once you have your free Wordpress blog, write a few pages; you now have a web site. Write some posts, and you also have a blog. (Don’t want a blog? Don’t write posts.) Choose a Wordpress ‘theme’ and you have a professional design. Write compelling, audience-focused content, and you’ll have an audience!
Yeah, okay, that’s some work, I grant you. But hopefully it’s not too scary. (Secret/not-secret: You can create many Wordpress blogs! for free! if you hate the first one, make a new one. They’re all always free.)
I hope that I get to see some of you tomorrow, and for those who attended the workshop and are reading this post after-the-fact, thank you for coming! I appreciate you taking the time and hope we were of some help.
There, now I can fall asleep without the fear of Emma’s wrath following me into my dreams.
(Who am I kidding? Emma put her stuff up on her site WEEKS ago. She’s wanted to kill me for WEEKS.)
Happy Conference!
* To register your domain name (also known as your “URL” - for example michellemcginnis.com). More details on that over at Emma’s site.
** No, I don’t work for Wordpress. There are other excellent, free blog/site options out there, and we list a few others in our handouts. I’ve just personally used Wordpress the most often, so I feel the most comfortable recommending it.
In early 2008 Michelle left a fulfilling career as interactive director in an integrated marketing agency to pursue her passion for writing great stories filled with fascinating, intense, real characters who will do anything necessary to achieve their dreams. She’s co-written the audio-play of a Louis L’Amour short story produced by Bantam and Beau L’Amour, worked as an executive assistant for a Hollywood publicist, taught English in Spain, and enjoyed the lofty title of Romance Director running the personals sections of a newsweekly in Los Angeles. She lives in Austin, Texas and spends her spare time adding poems to
I loved your late night post!
Silly woman - I have not wanted to kill you!! Are you kidding? You’ve actually be writing on your manuscript lately, whereas I’ve just TALKED about writing on my manuscript. So clearly you are the winner here and taking our own workshop advice: work on your website just a little, work on your manuscript a whole lot.
Well? How’d it go? Did you kick ass???? I’m sure you both did because you’re both FABULOUS!
Hi Lexi - thank you, I think it went well! We had quite a few people come up to us afterward and ask additional questions, which I think is a great sign (if only that we didn’t act too scary up at the podium). We even had one wonderful author go home and immediately create her own Wordpress site - check it out at http://dianefarr.wordpress.com/. (Go Diane!)
I went to your workshop in San Francisco then we had lunch together when mine was the only tabel that wasn’t full. Now that I hope you remember me, I think I misunderstood some of what you said in the workshop. I “think” you talked about being able to create your own web pages and then being able to post them on your website — or somehow connect them to you web host. Did I confuse this with bloggs? Basically, I’m totally inept when it comes to doing anything more than writing books and emails on my computer. I want to start a website where I can post new material whenever I want to change stuff which could be often and only a few lines. Is this possible? I already have a domain name with GoDaddy. I know you don’t like them, but I did this years ago. Is there someone who has some sort of preset program for people like me where we put our information of prototypes? I don’t mind paying. I’m just terrible about keeping my Leigh Greenwood website up to date because it takes so much effort and I have to do it through someone else. I’ll shut up now. If you would rather call, my number is (704) 264-1908. Thanks. I enjoyed the workshop and lunch.
Harold Lowry