What I learned building the website

It was a few (okay more than a few now) weeks ago that this article on Vox floated around on Writer Threads. The TLDR of that post was essentially if you're an aspiring author looking to sell books, you need to be building an online presence right now. Even if you're looking for a traditional publishing deal. It caused quite a bit of stir amongst the writing community, as you can imagine. Now, this post is not about addressing the validity (or not) of what that post claims. In fact, if you'd like to read a lovely counterpoint to that article, I recommend Jane Freidman's excellent counter-post over at her blog.  But what I can say is that it motivated me. Because Jane is right - no amount of self-promotion in the world is going to convince a publisher to pick up your novel if it's not well written and appealing to a modern day audience. But it is a bonus. Spending time building an online platform (and presence, those are actually separate things) is not necessary to query your book to agents, and then in turn to gain the attention of a publisher, but it doesn't hurt.

So given that I'd just decided to start pushing the book I completed four years ago again, to resume once again the process of querying for representation, I decided actually, before I sent a single new query letter, I wanted to begin the task of establishing an online presence. And the first step of that, would be to build an author website.

Goal 1: Share the World

As I described in an earlier post, the actual world of Athania, that Sera's Arrow is set in, was built decades before Sera's Arrow was written. And I had created an extraordinary amount of information for this world. Not just its geography, but its countries, its peoples, its magic system, its pantheon of gods, even its calendar and roots of some of its languages. So one of the first really big things I wanted to do was to share this enormous amount of content I'd created for Athania. I want to draw people in (if I can) and hopefully get them interested in tales set within that world. So that meant.. A map!

When I created Athania some 30 years ago, I hand sketched out a map on a piece of graph paper. And somewhere along the way, in a rare stroke of genius for me, I scanned that hand drawn map in and saved it. So I wasn't creating from scratch, I already had something to use. All I really needed was some software to take my hand-drawn 30 year old sketch and make it look good!

Mapmaking Software

There are actually quite a few really good tools out there for making maps. But it seemed to me that two really stood out above the rest - Inkarnate, and Wonderdraft. Both of these are more than up to the task of creating a really good looking world map. For me, I chose Wonderdraft for two main reasons: First, it's a stand-alone downloaded app, rather than being completely web-based, as Inkarnate is. I'm old school in that way and prefer an app on my computer over a complete online thing. It's actually my single biggest (though really only) hangup about Canva.  The other thing for Wonderdraft is that there is a great community for it, and a ton of aftermarket resources for free or very low cost to highly customize things like the looks of your mountains, your trees, your cities etc. After several weeks of futzing with it, I can heartily recommend it. You can see the results over at the Geography page under the World section of the site.

Site Building Software

If you're building a website, the very first thing you have to decide is how you're going to build it. Do you want to use a web hosting service, and then just build it yourself from the ground up, maybe taking advantage of a good CMS like WordPress? Or will you use one of the many web building services out there that both host as well as provide full-fledged quick-build tools for you with templates and such. And of course there are variations to both of these, but that's mostly what it boiled down to. Now I've done the full host-my-own and build it all website myself in the past. And.. It's well, a lot of work. And I really want to not spend time working on the website any more than I have to. So I went with Option B - use a web building service. Of course there are lots of options there, and if you're looking for a good writeup of best website builders for authors, at the time of this writing, this was a really useful read for me.

I looked at hard at Wix, and Hostinger, but ultimately settled on Squarespace. Especially it's built in blogging service, which I'm using today.

Goal 2: Subscriber Sign up with an Automated Reader Magnet

The second most important goal of the website was to build community. Why is this? Well namely because I'm not 100% convinced anymore that I might not want to self publish Sera's Arrow. I've met some fantastic authors through social media that are self-publishing, and the more I look at author cuts and read the grim news from traditionally published authors, the more I'm wavering on my up-until-now hard position of traditionally published only. And if I do decide to self-publish, it's absolutely important I try to build a community of people that are excited about the book and the world. So the goal: Readers can subscribe, they get a welcome e-mail (automatically upon subscribing), and they can download a nice writing sample from Sera's Arrow. Actually, it was originally the prologue to Sera's Arrow, which I cut, for reasons. But I love it, so now it's a nice little short-story prequel ebook.

So for the next part of the journey, I have to send a shoutout to Richard Parry. He was super helpful over on Threads in informing me of the myriad of options before me to get done what I wanted to get done. Because as is always the case with these things, there was way more to it than I knew.  As I learned.  You should definitely check out Richard's website, and go buy his books. 

The Form

The form was actually easy. Squarespace has a built in template for accepting signups, and it worked great. Got it in and customized no problemo. But what does it do with the data? Well it will save the data internally as a "subscriber" list (more on this later), and you can link a google drive up to it and it will create and add subscribers to a google docs worksheet for you. Not remarkable, but pretty nice.

The E-Mail

The next part was harder. How to get an e-mail generated automatically? Well Squarespace again, does have a solution. You can create e-mail campaigns, but you can only send 3 per month, and they are manually sent "blasts", if you will. I push a button, and it blasts out my cleverly crafted e-mail to my current list of subscribers. Which while useful, is not what I want. To do what I want, that's called an "automation" - where it automatically sends out an e-mail in response to someone signing up. Exactly what I want! Only.. Squarespace requires you to sign up for an additional campaigns package to get that functionality. Which is of course an additional monthly cost above and beyond your website hosting. So it would be another $10.00 a month for that functionality. >.<  So I started looking elsewhere.

Again, there are quite a few options out there for automated e-mail distribution. But I saw that MailerLite had integration support with Squarespace (Yay!) and integration support for BookFunnel Yay! (More on Bookfunnel later). So I signed up with mailerLite, and began crafting my amazing (template based) webpage like welcome e-mail. Which of course required learning yet another visual editor. So I got my e-mail all crafted, and started to investigate the Squarespace integration. 

And that's when I learned that when Squarespace upgraded to their latest version, they dropped their MailerLite integration. So the integration only works for Squarespace Classic, which I don’t have, and couldn't use if I wanted to. But, no worries, MailerLite will also let you build the form on their webpage, and then cut & past the HTML directly into your website! And Squarespace supports HTML imbed, so we're golden, right? Not so much. Again, I spent an afternoon building a custom form in MailerLite, matching my site's themes and colors, and went to imbed it in Squarespace's imbed block, only to learn that Squarespace requires you to upgrade to the commercial package (again, more money) if you want to use javascript and/or java in an imbed block. Seriously? So, no way to get (without spending more money) an imbedded form on my website that talks directly to MailerLite. 

But MailerLite does allow you to build an automation with its free version! So  whenever I add a subscriber to mailerlite, it will automatically send out my welcome e-mail to that person But for now, the way I do it is I watch for updates to the google spreadsheet, and then manually add the subscribers to mailerLite as they come in, when then sends out the e-mail. Obviously, this process won't scale. But it works for now.

And the Rest..

There's more, but this post is already excruciatingly long, so I'm going to wrap this up. I learned a lot about wrangling Scrivener into creating a decent ebook format, along with the help of a e-book editing package called Calibre. Highly recommend if you don't know about it. And then I set up an account with BookFunnel, to handle my e-book distribution. Because you can't attach pdfs (or anything really) to mass-distributed e-mails sent through MailerLite.  And once again, I learned that to do what I actually wanted to do, which was to enforce e-mail signup to download the book (which is totally something they provide) I was going to have to sign up for more costly account.  So for now I have a nice download landing page, and can provide a link to through the e-mail. But anyone with the link can download the e-book. Which again is fine for now, it's just a free sample. But if I were to ever actually use it for sold books, It's going to cost more money.

And that's really the TLDR from todays too-long first new post since launching the website. To do even the simple thing that I wanted to so requires three different services from three different providers, with you figuring out how to make them all work together, and each of them wanting their own monthly sub cost to get where you want to be. If you're setting out on this journey, I hope this helps you prepare for what’s ahead.

If you have any questions about the stuff I talked about, the services, etc., or if you know of other better, simpler, less costly solutions, please post in the comments below!