The Business of Writing

The Business of Writing

10/16/2011 12:42:14 PM

 
Ninety percent of my working hours should be spent writing. This post is about the other ten percent.

I'm sure there are a lot of places where I can find tips and advice about running a self-employed business from the home. Google came up with ten pages worth. I'm sure I'll get into some of that, but I started a little closer to home. Recently, the San Diego Union Tribune (the "U-T" as the paper is marketing themselves now) had a special business section called "Ginormous Jobs." One of the articles got my attention: "10 Ways to Build Your Online Identity" focuses on creating and managing a "personal brand." What that means, in short, is making sure that you are aware of all information that is out there about you; that it's accurate, consistent, and says what you want it to.

I've been going through those ten suggestions and have learned a few things along the way. It starts with keeping track of references to yourself on the web. One good way to do that is to use a free service called Google Alerts. I have a very common name, so I used several forms of my name and my pen name to track any new hits on those names that turn up. I get an Alert via email each day there is a hit. I've come across some interesting activity about other people with my name. There is a music group trio with my name that I thought was kind of cool. Then there was the guy from Harrisburg, PA (near where I used to live) who has been missing now for two weeks who has the exact same name as mine except for a "D" added to his middle name. That feels a little spooky, this close to Halloween.

The next task was to establish my "web presence."  I did research about web hosting and domain name services and decided to go with the company InMotion Hosting. They have the capabilities and features that I wanted at a cost I can manage.  After deciding on InMotion I took a look at their forum pages to see what their users had to say. I discovered that at the beginning of October the company had been hit by a hacker who defaced many of their customer's websites. While I was not happy that the site failed to protect their customers from the hack, I was impressed with the successful recovery efforts and their openness even when it reflected badly on them. In the end I decided to give them a try anyway, voting with my checkbook for their honesty and dedicated response. It didn't hurt that by strange coincidence their two data centers are located in San Diego and Virginia Beach.

Having my own domain means that I can give that domain any name I want - or, more accurately, any name that is not already taken. I had also checked out several websites of authors that I liked to see how they named their own sites. Most used the name they published under, either their real name or pen name. There are some exceptions, such as Orson Scott Card. He used the domain name Hatrack for his site, but it's easy to see why. There is a history to the name that his fans understand; plus, Card is a very big figure in the science fiction community and that recognition provides a lot of protection to his "brand."  I really had two choices - my real name or my pen name. I checked and both were available. Since I have already published stories under my pen name, I decided to go with that for the domain. Which you should already know by looking at my website address. I still think it's kind of cool to have my own dot-com address.

Checking out other author websites also helped me put together the features I wanted for my own website. Frankly, I wasn't very impressed with many of them and didn't find much that would keep me coming to those sites. The basic layout that I was looking for I found at author Gregory Benford's site. His site is managed by Lucky Bat Books (online services and e-book services) and the website was designed using Wordpress software. Lucky Bat is for authors who actually make a living at it - ie, I can't afford their prices. Benford's site is certainly more extensive than I could manage at present, but the framework and information presented is pretty much what I used for my site. The InMotion folks gave me several choices for setting up the website, including Wordpress. Instead, I went with the simplest template based program, and that was both good and bad. The bad was that it took more time that I expected to find and tweak a template that did what I wanted it to. I did take time to look over the other web publishing software offered. I like the additional flexibility and will likely learn one of those at some point. I do love to tinker, and I could spend the next month learning and playing with website software, but that would certainly blow my 90% writing rule. I stuck with my first choice, and while I intend to improve on it at some point, overall I'm satisfied with the results. For now.

Other things on the list of ten I'm still working on include finding and joining associations and sites that support writers. That will be an ongoing thing.

Matt 10/19/2011 9:53:11 AM

Wordpress Thank you! Wordpress is quickly becoming one of the best applications for someone to use to not only have a blog but to have social networking, e-commerce and a ton of other plugins and features that anyone would want on their site. Just let me know :)

Charlie 10/19/2011 8:01:42 AM

Wordpress Nice work, Matt! Just looking what you've done I saw things that I am going to want on my own site. When I get time I'm going to take a look at Wordpress and will probably have a lot of questions.

Matt 10/18/2011 12:40:46 PM

Wordpress Hello! I do know how to use Wordpress and you can see my handy work here, http://droidappscentral.com/ I created that with a already set template and then just did some HTML Editing to make it the way I wanted. I also did http://firsttimehomeowner.biz/blog/ Let me know if you need help!

Charlie 10/18/2011 7:07:13 AM

My Smart Nephew Wow! Hmm, does he know how to use Wordpress or Joompla? :-)

tim 10/17/2011 5:56:51 PM

coincidence There is more of a coincidence to InMotion than their location, Matthew works for them.