All posts by Jordan

Technique

The plot thickens!

11 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 24 in the series The plot thickens (Mwahahaha)

As Andrew guessed last week, our next series is on plotting! (I’m mentally referring to this series as “Mwahahaha.” Three ha’s, if you please.)

plotthickensLast week, we discussed plotting briefly—but now let’s get into it. What do you want to learn about plotting? Are you a plotter or a pantser? Have you changed “sides”? (I have.) If so, why?

I used to be a pantser—some romantic notions about a story springing fully formed from my head like Athena from the mind of Zeus, and fears about outlining killing my muse. I would start off with an interesting beginning, a twist or two in mind, and the end goal. I would make up the middle parts as I went along.

And then I got stuck.

For like a month. (That’s a very long time for me, when I’m in the middle of the draft and supposedly letting those unstifled ideas flow.)

I finally got unstuck, but what I made up as I went along ultimately didn’t work. It all had to be rewritten, and should I hope to publish that MS one day, I’m probably going to have to toss most of it and do a whole new plot (with one or two of the same twists and turns, because they made those characters who they were, but other than that, starting from scratch with the characters/situation).

My next project was something I did with one of my best friends. We came up with an idea to write parallel novels with four main characters (a hero and heroine for each of us, with her heroine and my hero as siblings).

Oh, and also it was going to be a murder mystery (on my side; less so on hers, since they couldn’t all be investigating). We had to know who did it, when, and why—what events led up to it, what other characters were involved.

tapping pencilAnd since the investigation was part of my story line, I had to plot.

To my surprise, instead of killing my muse, plotting fueled it. I got to know the murderer (with a 1st person character freewrite) and his motivations. I searched for the worst possible thing that could happen—and the next, and the next, and the next—and made sure even the good things that happened were timed to my characters’ disadvantage.

I came to love turning the screws.

To me, plotting is your first chance to know your story. You may be like I was, and have an ending and one or two twists in mind, and take off to discover the rest. And there’s joy in discovering the story, finding the characters and their twists and turns.

But when I’m plotting, I get to experience that all at once. I get to discover—engineer—the twists and turns in a matter of hours, to hold the whole story in my mind (which I just can’t do with 100,000 words). As I mentioned last week, when I know what’s coming, I can plant clues, turn those screws to make the coming disasters even worse, or foreshadow. Naturally, I’ll have to go back and tweak all those things, but some of my favorite nuances have come from knowing where I’m going and finding a happy coincidence in the present scene.

I’m hooked.

What about you? To reiterate the original questions: What do you want to learn about plotting? Are you a plotter or a pantser? Have you changed “sides”? If so, why?

Tapping pencil by Tom St. George

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Publishing

If actors were like writers

This is how they’d get agents:

Dearest Prospective Agent,

Forsooth! I write this epistle to thy milky hand (thou art a maid, aye?), that I might win it and thee thereby to be mine agent. I see that thou doth represent mine colleague, Laurence Olivier, and thou must know that I am indeed a most convincing method actor. Thou mightest be able to tell from this letter that my true skill rests in Shakespearean tragedy.

I would be overjoyed to discuss my career. I call anon!

Sincerely,
Archer Feathersboroughbottom

(In case you’re wondering, actors get agents by a.) agents seeing their work and contacting them, b.) referral from other actors to their agents, or c.) sending a photo and résumé to an agent, which does seem a bit more appropriate than a query letter.)

What do you think? How would you query an acting agent?

Photo by Hashim Talbot

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Technique

37 ways to keep readers’ pulses racing—and keep them reading

6 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 26 in the series Tension, suspense and surprise

I’m brushing up today on creating tension in a scene. There are lots of “tricks” and techniques to get the “tension in every page” Donald Maass recommends. While I don’t really go in for resorting to tricks to create suspense, little techniques can really establish, increase or build the tension within a scene.

Looking for info on rewards per page for your novel? Check out this post on giving readers what they want!

The list:

  1. Give a character a goal in each scene
  2. Setbacks to a character’s goal in a scene
  3. Uncertainty—often from a lack of information
  4. Worry—plenty of bad information
  5. Doubt, especially in one’s self (the character, not the writer 😉 )
  6. Raise the stakes—put more people or a bigger, more valuable objective in danger

    7. bite nails

  7. Increase the odds against the character
  8. Make the characters care more—greater emotional stakes
  9. Make things more challenging
  10. Surprise character or event to change things up
  11. Nonhuman obstacles—setting or weather interfere
  12. Using the POV of a character that doesn’t know something vital (something we’ve established in another POV)
  13. End the scene with a foreboding foreshadowing
  14. Play on a character’s inner anxieties—push them to the limit (and beyond)
  15. Let the characters blow up—what are the consequences?
  16. “Minidisaster”—a preview of what could happen in the big disaster, by showing a small version of their impending doom.
  17. A close call
  18. A character purposefully withholding info from another
  19. Jump cutting to another scene/storyline immediately after a disaster
  20. Make characters’ goals look impossible. Or just make them impossible.
  21. Stating a chilling fact.
  22. Danger—dangerous, skillful work.
  23. Deadlines approaching
  24. Foreshadowing a coming confrontation

    25. grip knuckles

  25. An unfortunate meeting
  26. Trapped in a closed environment (perhaps a crucible?)
  27. Fears coming true
  28. Set up any of these situations and prolong them, rather than relieving the tension
  29. Remove characters’ supports
  30. Disable characters’ strengths
  31. Undermine characters’ belief systems (not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a “I’m fighting for the greater good—holy crap, what do you mean the victim’s a bad guy?” kind of way)
  32. Move up the deadline
  33. Avoid low-tension scenes (sequels, really):
    • Thinking (esp while driving between one scene with live action and another)
    • Decompressing or cleaning up
    • Coffee breaks
    • “Aftermath” scenes
    • Sometimes, even love scenes—a sex scene releases all the sexual tension you’ve established, so then you have to reestablish that tension with something to keep them apart. Though this can be done well, often, this is where we get the contrived or entirely external conflicts that just aren’t that compelling.
  34. Leave out the parts people skip 😉 —distill scenes to their essential parts
  35. Cut small talk (unless you’ve worked hard to establish that the small talk is covering something else, something with a lot of tension, or you’ve got a lot of subtexting)
  36. Make one character’s scene goal conflict with another’s scene goal
  37. Make us root for the other guy—make the antagonist a sympathetic character, so we want both sides to win.

Sources: Revision And Self-Editing by James Scott Bell, Stein On Writing by Sol Stein, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, and me, of course.

What do you think? What do you do to create or increase tension in a scene? How can you implement these ideas in your work?

Photo credits: nail biter—Cavale Doom; knuckled grip—Alex Schneider

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Technique, Works

How do you write?

11 Comments

I have to admit it: I’m one of those writers who doesn’t really do much of anything until I absolutely fall in love with an idea—anything from a character to a scene to a setting. My ideas come from dreams, friends, books, movies, TV, etc. But until an idea really grabs me, I can’t sustain my interest enough to spend three or four months on drafting.

light fire matchesBut man, when that idea strikes, it’s hard to make myself do the normal day-to-day, keeping-the-house-clean, being-a-mom stuff. All I want to do is write, and yet no matter how fast I write (my record is 5000 words in a day), it’s not fast enough. The rest of the book stretches out in front of me, scenes and lines and snippets that threaten to slip away before I can get there. So I race on.

An idea struck three weeks ago. So far, I’ve gotten down almost 23,000 words. (Woot! Check out my progress bar in the sidebar.) I’m excited to be drafting again (first time since April), and if I finish the draft by October 21, I’ll have drafted three books in a year. That’s pretty cool.

It’s interesting how different each book is, you know? Not just plot-wise or character-wise (although these three books have the same hero/heroine), but process-wise.

This time around, I’ve accepted that what I like to get in there are people, action, dialogue and plot twists. Cool. On my last MS, I tried to get everything in there on the first draft—sensory details, settings, character descriptions, etc. etc. This time, I’m embracing my favorite parts—I mean, I’ll put in the other stuff as needed, but if a scene is all dialogue/action, and it takes place in a vacuum, I’m not going to cry about it in this draft.

inspireFor me, that’s stuff I can add later, in each layer of editing. In fact, I’m taking this week off drafting to go back to the first MS I wrote during this year to add in more of those descriptions and sensory information, since the second half of the book is rather bereft of those (silly me, thinking all the character and setting descriptions were established in the first half, and we wouldn’t need anymore after that!).

How about you? What inspires you? Do you try to get everything in one draft—and if not, what do you leave out to add in later?

This week is probably going to be a bit of a catch-all week as I try to get things done between editing bouts and housecleaning—and, of course, working on the PDF from our website series. But next week, we’ll start another new and awesome series. I think 😉 .

Photo credits: matches—Kicki; inspire—Mark Brannan

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Marketing

The challenge of a pseudonym, LaBeletteRouge.blogspot.com

3 Comments

Today we have our final website review for La Belette Rouge: oh, the luxuries of going last. Have you been reading and making adjustments all along? Cheater 😉 .

(Remember, we’ll be doing more website reviews in a few months, so subscribe so you don’t miss the call for volunteers!)

belette1

Kathleen’s comments

Dear ‘Belette Rouge,’

I visited your site and I was . . . intrigued. It seems that you have a pretty wide circle of friends online, and that’s a good thing! The number of comments your posts bring shows that you’re doing something right. 🙂

But to be quite honest, I’m not sure what to review! I see from the series down on the left that you have blogged on writing . . . but that doesn’t seem to be the focus at present. Without reading the whole blog, I don’t know what you write, to know if it’s something I’m interested in. I’m not sure what the focus of the blog is, to know if it’s something I might like to subscribe to. I don’t know what “Belette” means, so that doesn’t give me any hints.

question_3I’ll ask you the same thing I asked a few other blog owners . . . what is the purpose of your site? What is your goal? If yours is community (which you seem to be doing excellent at fostering), then I think your community would attract new participants more easily if your site clearly states what your community revolves around.

Give the site a clear blog description, and put something at the top of your sidebar, or above the posts that explains it a little more. [Also, a tag line displayed as part of the header can be a great help for quickly letting visitors know what your blog’s all about—Jordan.] You might find new readership builds much faster!

I’ll be offline for most of next week, but if you’ve got a specific question, go ahead and ask it in the comments and I’ll reply when I’m back online.

Happy blogging!

–Kathleen MacIver / KatieDid Design

Jordan’s comments

Pages

Your blog is another example of a “lifestyle” blog, where you blog about your daily experiences from the mundane to the therapeutic. You have a great voice and wonderful humor that comes through in every post.

However, while you have a series on life as a writer, you don’t highlight any WIPs or works prominently on your blog.

volunteerThere may be a good reason for this. If you’re purposefully blogging under a pseudonym, and you want it keep it that way, you may want to keep potential publication info away from your site so you don’t get your real name associated with your site. (Then again, maybe you should be writing under a pseudonym, too.)

But if you don’t have that aversion, you might consider featuring your works more prominently.

I might also suggest a menu bar—a single line of text underneath the header that links to the permanent features of your site. This is where you can put links to your About page, a page about your WIPs and writing credits, and possibly pages on the various areas of your site—writing, infertility, Francophilia, etc.

Sidebars

The top two elements in your sidebar are encouraging visitors to subscribe—nicely done. I might add a little explanation (or a link to an explanatory post) in the first Subscribe widget (if possible), so people know what it means to subscribe—something you do well for the email subscription link.

Your contact information is fairly prominent on each page, as the third element in the sidebar. However, because your header image is so long, that contact information is below the fold. I’m torn over whether that’s enough. But it’s good that you offer several different ways to connect with you.

glassy eyedAlso, your sidebar is quite long. I really like that you’ve been highly selective about what badges and honors to display. However, there are still a lot of links there. When visitors come across a long list of links, their eyes are likely to gloss over—they can’t focus on any single link, so they don’t bother looking at any of them. (A lot of links on a single page may also dilute the value you’re passing along to the sites you link to, in search engines’ eyes.)

If you want to make the links in your sidebar stand out more, you might consider having fewer of them. Don’t worry, I’m not saying you should just ditch links to your favorite blogs—but over 200 links on the main page is kind of a lot to handle. Instead, you could consider a single post, linked in your side bar or menu bar, for all your favorite links/blog roll. You can still use the same headings and divisions on the page, too.

Your own search engine presence, however, is fantastic. Your blog is #1 for [belette rouge] on Yahoo, Google and Bing (and also #2 on Yahoo and Google and #3 on Bing). The rest of the top ten results are all about you—your Facebook profile, your blog on various blog sites, friends’ mentions of your blog.

And obviously, with that many followers and that kind of discussion on each post, you have a fantastic community on your blog.

What do you think? Would you rather have a popular community on a lifestyle blog under a pseudonym where you wouldn’t want to promote your writing, or an author website with your real (or publishing) name?

Photo credits: question—Svilen Mushkatov; no pictures, please—StillSearc; glassy eye—Michelle Mangum

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Marketing

Minisites: a shared author site, ScorchedSheets.com

5 Comments

Our review today is for Scorched Sheets. Elise Logan volunteered, but her site is actually a shared author site, with Emily Ryan-Davis. They also offer serial reads—very cool.

How does a shared author site work? Well, Elise and Emily have made it so they basically have two “minisites” (like we mentioned yesterday) on the same domain (except they’re using directories instead of subdomains), as well as a shared minisite.
elise1

Jordan’s comments

Pages

Woohoo! You know how I love dedicated contact pages. Yours looks like it’s designed really well for two authors sharing a website—you can contact one or both of you (I think—I assume the SS Admin link goes to both of you—if not, you might want to change that to webmaster, and see about adding an option to contact both of you). The only thing I would say here is that it doesn’t look like you have a link to the contact page on your own part of the site—that might be useful, if someone comes directly to your part of the site instead of the main page. (Kathleen has a great suggestion for this, too.)

On the blog, the subscribe links could be a little more prominent (right now they’re below the fold, and below the Twitter widget)—and a lot of people require an explanation of what it means to subscribe.

On your part of the site (/elise-logan/), I might recommend placing your book covers where they’re visibile “above the fold”—in the part of the page you can see when it first loads, without scrolling down any, like you have them on the blog. For you, that would probably be in the top right (where you have your publisher link—switching the two, really).

You could also do a little more to promote your books on your site—the reviews are a good start here. Let us know what the story is about and why we’ll want to read it—I’m sure you’ve mentioned it on your blog before, but put that info into one place (or at least link to it from the Books page) so we can find it easily.

Search engine presence

spider confusedBecause your main page is so heavily based on graphics, it might be a little hard for search engines to understand. One spider simulator showed this when I pointed it to your page:

scorched sheets import url http scorchedsheets com wp content themes erdelise style css png background image expression this runtimestyle filter progid dximagetransform microsoft alphaimageloader src this tagname ‘img’ this ‘src’ this currentstyle ‘backgroundimage’ split ‘ ‘ 1 this runtimestyle backgroundimage none this src http scorchedsheets com wp content plugins wp pngfix pixel gif this width this style width this clientwidth this height this style height this clientheight pngbg behavior url http scorchedsheets com wp content plugins wp pngfix iepngfix htc concealed display none block display block copyright 2009 all rights reserved scorched sheets and all contributing authors designed by get cesigned top sitemap chat log in chat plugin by bowob chat for wordpress this site uses a hackadelic plugin hackadelic sliding notes 1 6 2

Also, the simulator found only seven links to other pages on your site: two to the front page, two to your page, one to the sitemap, one to /bowob/ (which is broken) and one to the WordPress login page.

This can be a problem for both search engines and users who have their browsers read aloud the page’s text to them (i.e. blind users). To help with this, you can add the alt tag to the image map on your main page. For example, where your code now has:

<area shape=”rect” coords=”218,1,459,60″ href=”elise-logan”></area>

you could add the alt tag to make it more descriptive:

<area shape=”rect” coords=”218,1,459,60″ alt="Elise Logan, [tagline here]" href=”elise-logan”></area>

You could do the same thing with a title element, which changes what visitors see when they hover their mouse over a link. This might not make your homepage rank #1 for your names, but it will make it a little more understandable.

missing puzzle pieceOne thing going for you is you have a sitemap. Generally, that’s a good way (albeit a last resort) to help users and especially search engines find the content on your site. However, when I clicked on the sitemap link, it was broken.

In both Google and Yahoo, your site is #1 and #2 for [scorched sheets]—with the blog as the #2 on Google and Emily’s page as the #2 for Yahoo.

For [Elise Logan], the main page is #1 and a blog post from Scorched Sheets is #2 on Google. Yahoo has your part of the site (/elise-logan/) as #1. The same blog post that ranks on Google is #4 for your name on Yahoo. Your Twitter profile is #3 on Google and on Bing.

For [Emily Ryan Davis], her part of the site is #1 on Google and Bing (now there‘s a surprise!). The same blog post as above is #2 on google (Excerpt Monday from last month, in case you’re wondering). Yahoo has EmilyRyanDavis.com (which she redirects to her part of the site) as #1 and #2.

It’s very interesting that Emily seems to have a better search engine presence than you do. What are you doing differently in terms of links? Is it because she’s been in the business longer?

Kathleen’s comments

Dear Emily and Elise,

Wow! Fantastic custom-designed site! And it’s great that you two teamed up. That means you split the costs of the site and the blog duties, but you SHARE readers! So anyone who finds one of you will most likely try the other as well. Great marketing!

Your intro/splash page does well at instantly portraying romance writing. I think the only struggle I had was knowing where to click. I instantly knew the site represented a romance author, but there were none of the normal “Books” links, which is where I usually click. Of course, those are on your individual portions of the site . . . but I didn’t know that at first. I did see your two names after a few moments, but you know what my first thought was? That one name was the author, and the other was a character.

I knew Emily Ryan-Davis was an author, since we’ve crossed paths over on the Romance Divas site, but if I hadn’t known that, I wonder if I’d have thought that both names were character names? Because of this, I think it might help to add some sort of a romantically-scrawled phrase across the right side of the home page that says something along the lines of “Two authors, five series/worlds, countless stories…” That would instantly make everything clear.

The main issue with the site is that, if someone googles your name(s), they’ll probably end up on one of the inside pages of the site. So when people find you that way (which is what most will do), they may not notice the little sidebar links to your blog, your serial, and your news feeds. There isn’t even a link to your root home page that you share. And that means that most of your promotion efforts are only about 25% as effective as they could be.

You want EVERYONE who googles your names and finds your site to know about the other (don’t count on them noticing or clicking on the other name at the bottom of the pages), know you have a blog (and hopefully sign up for updates), check out your serial, etc. You don’t want them to click around and leave without knowing they exist!

Sooo . . . you need to add a second link menu with the same links that are on your home page. I’d add it above your current menu in such a way that the “Emily” link is highlighted when you’re on Emily’s half of the site, and the “Elise” link is highlighted when you’re on Elise’s half. Maybe that “Two authors…” line should be small and run across the page just above it. This shouldn’t be too difficult to add to the site, and it shouldn’t affect your layout at all. It’ll just help you both get the most out of your promotional efforts.

I’ll take a moment here to point out that this is why, when you design a website, we cannot simply think of making the site beautiful. Beauty is important . . . but beauty is wasted if function is forgotten. Any time we are thinking about a website redesign, we have to put ourselves in the mind of our prospective visitors . . . try to imagine what they’ll see and think. And we must do this with EVERY page of our site.

opening-doorIt’s not enough to make sure that the site makes sense from the home page, because very, very few people enter a site by the front door. We can’t even count on people who find us through a business card or bookmark entering through the front door because an unbelievably large percentage of Internet users think that URLs are supposed to be entered into the search engine bar of their browser. They don’t even know that URL bar exists up there! [Aggravating, but true: Google searches for “amazon.com” and “google.com” are amazingly high, and 24% of Internet users can’t even navigate to Google.com!—Jordan] And Google will usually rank inner pages of a site higher than the front page. Why? Because that’s where the content is!

Other than that, your site is beautiful. It offers everything readers expect to see on a site, and the free reads and serials offer people free samples of your writing, which will hopefully draw them in and make them buy. Congratulations!

–Kathleen MacIver / KatieDid Design

What do you think? Would you want to share websites with another author? How do you find your friends’ and favorite authors’ sites?

Photo credits: puzzle piece—Andronicus Riyono; door—Vinicio Capossela

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Marketing, News & Contests

How many websites do you need?

3 Comments
This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Aspiring author websites

A few reminders today: we’re almost done with our website review series—just two reviews left. Several people have asked about getting on the list. We took volunteers back in July—but Kathleen and I are both surprised at how well-received this series has been. We’re planning to do this again, but it probably won’t be for a couple months. (So subscribe to make sure you don’t miss this call for volunteers!)

Another reminder: don’t forget to vote for the writing craft book club book. Don’t make me just choose one!

How many websites should you have?

frustrateA writing blog. An in-world children’s picture book website. A website for your steamy romance ebooks. A site for your nonfiction aspirations. A personal blog. How many websites can one person have?

The answer, of course, is as personal as your websites should be—you can have as many websites as you can handle (and please, no more! A neglected website is sometimes worse than no site at all.). But how many do you really need?

I’m of the opinion that you should try for as few sites as possible. At its simplest, this would be one website, with a blog as part of that website (if you truly feel you can maintain a blog).

However, in some situations, you will need separate or nearly separate sites. These situations might include:

  • Genres that are completely incompatible—where writing in one genre could permanently alienate readers in another genre (like the above example of picture books and hot romance).
  • Writing under different names—especially in conjunction with the above example.

Note that I also said “nearly separate” sites—rather than completely separate sites, you could try doing “minisites.” For example, if you’re writing in very different genres but under the same name, you could have Mystery.YourDomain.com and UrbanFantasy.YourDomain.com . The sites would have at least one or two links to one another, and to your main site, but would remain mostly separate.

a-novel-characterAnd then there’s the question of personal stuff: does it have a place on your professional site(s)? That also depends on your genre, the tone of your personal stuff, and your audience. If you have a “lifestyle” blog before you get published, then it’s fine to keep that and maintain the personal tone and the insights into your personal life.

However, if that’s not the kind of site and community you’ve already built, be cautious about sharing personal stuff. Introducing too much information, unprofessional presentation, or flat-out boring content can hurt your brand.

On the other hand, sharing some information about yourself—on a limited, interesting, professional basis—can help to make your website more personable and appealing. It’s a fine balance—and sometimes it takes some practice.

What do you think? How have you shared personal information in a way that appealed to your visitors? How many sites do you want/need?

Image credits: frustrated—John De Boer; character—Svilen Mushkatov

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Marketing

Go! phase site review: HughHowey.com

First off, we need to start with a huge congratulations! Hugh Howey, our next volunteer, is from North Carolina! That’s so freakin’ awesome! (I’m North Carolina born and raised 😀 ). Oh, and he also has his first book coming out in just a few weeks. I guess that’s important too. Hopefully Kathleen and I will be able to help you get your website ready for the influx of fans and media!

hugh1

Jordan’s comments

It’s time to promote the heck out of your book. Why not add a prominent purchase link to your sidebar? (Note: if you want to free up a little space in the sidebar, you could probably put the links to your pages across the top of your blog, just above or below the header image.) You could also sign up for Amazon Affiliates (yay $0.41—hey, sometimes that’s double the royalties you’d see from that book!). I’d also recommend adding a little summary or the back cover copy to your Books page to help entice us to buy.

Connecting with site visitors and readers

mazeThink about why your readers will be coming to your website. Will it be because they’re interested in your book and want to learn a little more before they buy? Will it be to learn more about the author? (You could probably help them out a little more there 😉 ). Will it be to learn more about your next book? Will it be because they’re reviewing your book for their blog or newspaper? What are they looking for? Help them to find it—and make their paths to their goals clear.

To make your blog posts a little more user friendly, you could make your posts more scannable. Few people sit and read online like they would read a book—but if we break up our text and highlight the main points, people can still “read” it and understand our points instead of glancing over the whole thing and reading nothing.

To do this, you can use bold, white space, headings, lists, block quotes, pictures (even stock images, such as from sxc.hu and Creative Commons–licensed ones from Flickr) and more. I see that you’ve done this in a few places, and that’s a great start. ProBlogger has a great post on making your content scannable that goes into more depth on the topic.

While you don’t have a dedicated contact page that I saw, having the contact info in the sidebar of each page might actually be enough. It’s high enough to be prominent—it displays on every page above the fold. I might suggest adding a link to subscribe to the blog there, too.

You have a newsletter! That’s excellent! I would recommend expanding the newsletter page so your potential subscribers know what they’re getting into—maybe archived issues?

Obviously you already have an active community around your site—you have forums, and they’re not just languishing in nothingness. Excellent. Now, how can you further involve these friends and neighbors? Can you make a badge for your book for them to carry on their blogs? Can you ask them to review your book? Get creative!

Search engine presence

hugh search resultsFor [Hugh Howey], your site ranks #1 and #2 on Google, and #1 and #3 on Yahoo. Awesome! Bing, as always, is evil. They have your Facebook profile first, followed by LinkedIn, Facebook again, Twitter, your publisher, two articles about another Hugh Howey, and your profile on Asimovs. So apparently they don’t just hate Blogger blogs.

For [Molly Fyde] (your character’s name, I take it?), however, only Google has your site in the top ten (and that’s at #10). MollyFyde.blogspot.com also appears in the top ten in Google (at #3)—I assume this is also your site. Is there a reason why you’re keeping both this blog and your blog at HughHowey.com? (I’m assuming you haven’t moved this content over to HughHowey.com, right?)

The rest of the top ten results are YouTube videos, posts on forums and social sites (which appear mostly to be yours; don’t worry, no one’s stealing your character), and pages from Amazon and your publisher. If you’re okay with those results, then it’s not a big deal. But if you want your site to place for those results, you might want to recruit more links to your site using the text [Molly Fyde]. See if those old forum and social network posts can link back to your website.

Since you’re on self-hosted WordPress, I have a few more specific guidelines to give, too. One thing to make your site a bit more attractive to search engines: use “pretty” permalinks. That way, instead of your About Me page being at http://www.hughhowey.com/?page_id=5/ , it would be at http://www.hughhowey.com/about-me/ (this can also be helpful to users if they’re looking at the URL).

BUT before you go changing anything, first you’ll need a plugin so you don’t break every link you’ve ever made. (That doesn’t always happen, but it can—and it would be less than fun.) I use Redirection by Urban Giraffe. Just install it and activate it, and then you can change the permalink structure in WordPress (it’s under Settings>Permalinks). You can set the exact structure that you like, but I suggest something with the post name ( %postname% ) in it.

Kathleen’s comments

Dear Hugh,

Nice nebula picture at the top! That, combined with the fact that I knew you were an author, instantly made me think sci-fi, so good! I’d also like to say that your writing voice is loud and strong on your blog posts. That’s fantastic.

I’m wondering, however, if a visitor who didn’t already know that you were an author would be able to figure that out. Your header text . . . “Chronicling the life of Molly Fyde” hints at that, but I’m wondering if you can make it a little stronger? Maybe add “in the science fiction world of ______” or something like that.

As it is right now, your website is dominated by a humorous story/sales pitch for a backpack. It’s well written, but it doesn’t tell us anything about your upcoming release. And when we click your “About Me” link, the text is slightly confusing. I mean, it says you want to be a science fiction writer, but it gives the impression that Molly Fyde is a real person. Is she? (I hope I’m not making an awful blunder by even asking. I’m not a sci-fi aficionada.) Your Books link doesn’t even portray that you’re an author, because many review sites and/d subject-matter sites have links called “Books.” Maybe change it to “My Books”?

globeFinally, what else can you do to bring your visitors into your world? Make your website a window into the world of your books. Draw them in, so they just can’t help wanting to know about the characters in your world. This might mean re-designing a new home page that focuses on your characters and your world, instead of your blog…that way, when you post reviews on other products and books, your visitor’s first impression is still on YOUR book, instead of someone else’s. Feature your book covers on your home page…maybe overlap that nebula image with a small photo of each of your books tilted on edge, so there’s an instant sales pitch in one glance. If not there, get those covers somewhere on the home page!

And what about your characters? Your blog description says it’s about “the life of Molly Fyde.” What is special about Molly Fyde’s life? How can you quickly and simply portray that, so your visitors are itching to get their hands on your book so they can read Molly’s story? Give us a chance to meet the most fascinating side of Molly, so she comes to life on our screens, and follow it up with a link to buy your books.

Have fun!

–Kathleen MacIver / KatieDid Design

What do you think? How would you promote your published books? How would you invite your website visitors into your characters’ world?

Photo credit: globe—Sanja Gjenero

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