I love writing. I have loved writing for most of my life. But when it comes to pursuing publication, love is not enough.

Love can help you to write every day (if that’s how you work). Love can help you to learn more. Love can make the world a happy, rosy place—remember when you were in love the first time, or when you first fell for the person you’re with now? Everything feels happy and skippy and you just know you’ll be together forever because you’ve got the right one (baby. Uh huh.).

You can love writing, and write every day—and if that’s what you want to do, great! If that makes you happy, you are a lucky, lucky person. Go forth, write and be happy (and never, never submit for publication. The rejection would make you sad, and if writing for yourself is enough, don’t taint that.).

But it takes more than love to do the work that’s required to reach publication (and beyond—it soooo doesn’t end there!). As the very-soon-to-be-published Kiersten White puts it:

This is where you switch from having a hobby to being a writer. The mind-numbing, hour-after-hour, please-I-don’t-want-to-do-this-anymore-let’s-just-watch-Arrested-Development-on-DVD-instead, how-on-earth-is-writing-this-much-work stage. Anyone can write a book. Everyone who wants to should. But it’s only when you put in the work (and make the sacrifices, and give up your social life and your sanity and occasionally lower your personal grooming standard) to take something that was fun and make it into something that is good that I think you cross from being a hobbyist to being a writer.

Writing is WORK. The best work, sure, but work nonetheless.

To use our love analogy again, let’s say you get married—and then comes reality. Suddenly, the pure euphoria of being together everysecondofeveryday isn’t there. You have an argument. You yell at each other. You don’t feel that overpowering high in his/her presence.

Suddenly, it takes more than love to keep going. It takes commitment. And it takes work. You keep going because you know the love is there, because you know this person/book is worth it—but love isn’t enough to get you there by itself.

How do you stay committed to your work? How do you cope when your love of writing isn’t enough to keep going?

Inspired in part by The Fantasy of Passion by Travis Robertson; photo by Victoria

As promised (finally), I thought it’d be nice to see some examples of the good—author websites that work. So I’ll point out a few and why they work for me, and then I’ll turn the time over to you.

Note, too, that I’m not interested in how freaking awesome-bells-and-whistles a website is—I want to look at how well it works at conveying the author, promoting his or her books, and inviting us to read.

Annette Lyon

Okay, yeah, so Annette’s my friend and we have some pretty obscure stuff in common (dads who were missionaries in Finland [and thus even knowing what the Kalevala is], linguistic obsessions, etc.). But even if that weren’t the case, I’d still like her website.

She’s the author of six published books, the four most recent of which are historical romances. I think her site does a good job of portraying literature and historical in its design.

I like that her front page is descriptive enough to let us know who she is and what she writes without being overly wordy or long (what you see above is pretty much everything on the front page). The site navigation is highlighted (and yes, there is some Flash animation on that—a bell/whistle, to be sure, but not one that really changes the way her site works).

That navigation works really well, too—in only six page titles, you know exactly what to expect in each section and where to go if you’re there looking for something specific. (If you’re not looking for anything specific, she encourages you to read an excerpt from her latest novel.)

At her Publications page, she features her most recent book prominently, with links to individual pages for each of her published books—featuring reviews, excerpts, author’s notes and historical notes.

Finally, she has a great blog hosted at http://blog.annettelyon.com (as I always recommend ).

Kiersten White

Sadly, Kiersten and I are not so much friends as I try to convince her we are. However, we are the same age, married men from the same city, have the same number of children and have even worked in the same industries.

Hm. Another person I have a bunch in common with. This may be indicative of a trend.

Uh, anyway, Kiersten’s first book is due out in September. It’s YA paranormal, and I think her site hints at that visually. She also does a great job of conveying her personality and writing style in the text of her site.

As with Annette’s, the navigation is easy to follow: you can easily find what you’re looking for and know what to expect on each page. She has a little teaser preview of her forthcoming novel as well as a section for her frequently asked questions.

Most of all, I really like Kiersten’s site because she did it herself. As she explained in the comments to Seven Things an Aspiring Author Website Must Have,

[My website] is pretty basic, but I did it all myself through Yahoo! web hosting. I’m not at all tech-savvy and had no problem setting it all up and managing it. It’s only like fifteen dollars a year, and I don’t think it looks too bad.

So it’s possible to create a good-looking website that works all by yourself.

Nothing helps you learn more than analyzing a site yourself! Go find your favorite author’s website and see if it works for you—and why or why not. (And of course, share your findings in the comments!)