Over the weekend, I had the privilege of attending the LDStorymakers writers’ conference for the third time. And for the second time, I pretty much panicked whenever I thought about the results of the first chapter contest.

In fact, I even told people (like, I don’t know, my own husband) that I hadn’t entered at all. (I told him to view this as evidence of only my own insecurities and the fragile state of my ego, not any reflection on him. Plus, I’d told him I entered months ago and he just forgot.)

But, as you may have guessed from the title of the post, I had the honor of receiving an award in their first chapter contest:

Mystery/Suspense Category: First Place for Façade!

And you can read that chapter here!

Thank you to everyone who helped me get my first chapter in shape—and thank you for all the feedback I’ve received on the chapter since then.

(And yes, if you’ve been here a while, I actually won the same award last year.)

Okay, so, obviously, that news isn’t “good” for you so much—but this next one is. Today I’m guest blogging at Romance University. It’s the fourth installment on a series on author websites:

• 7 Things an Aspiring Author’s Website Must Have—a guest post at Nathan Bransford’s blog (and yes, it was almost two years ago)
• Four things an author’s website must do (on my blog here)
• Five more things an author’s website must do (ditto)
• And new today: Seven things an author’s website must be!

And if that’s not good news for you, maybe this will be—three lucky commenters on Romance University will have their websites critiqued (critiques to be posted on Thursday)!! So head on over!

In yesterday’s website review, Kathleen mentioned how important it is to convey your genre with your website. It can be hard, depending on the genre. Even some published authors’ sites don’t do it well.

Quick: Can you tell me what genre these published authors write in? (I took the name off a couple and removed outright genre identifiers because that would be too easy, and that’s not what this is about—it’s about looking at the graphics on their site to see if they convey their genres. If you’ve read any of them or recognize their sites, try to judge only by what you see here.

Links and answers to be posted in the comments!

1.)

2.)

3.)

4.)

5.)

6.)

7.)

8.)

Post your guesses in the comments! The person with the most answers right (without cheating) will win . . . something!