An Author Website - Why Have One? - Some Random Thoughts On Web Building For Authors

How many writers maintain a blog and/or a website?





I’m curious as to how many writers here maintain a blog and/or a website.
My Answer:

At last count I had more than 200 websites and 32 blogs.

My author website/home page is this one: https://www.eelkat.com aka https://www.novel-writing-tips.com (1 website, and on it's many urls that all point to the same place - I bought every url on topic to my site and pointed them all at it and as more become available I continue to buy those as well; basically I'm gobbling up the monopoly on writing related url domains and redirecting all of them to one site; I'm also an SEO - MMO "guru" and quickly send every page on my site to #1 of Google Page 1 for it's primary keyword - there's only 3 author how-to websites that currently outrank mine in search results, and by the end of 2018 I'll likely have passed all 3 of them)

As of October 15, 2017 this site now contains 10,000 articles. As it is difficult to link 10,000 pages to a site index, only the top 1,000 most popular pages are linked to in the site index. The remaining 9,000 pages can be accessed through various links found within the other pages.

I write code and the entire site is hand coded, right down to every last dancing banana.

Because people always ask, considering few have seen a site like mine, as there are not many sites like it out there, and get blown away by it first time they do see it... the first thing people always want to know, how the hell did I build it, how much did it cost, and can I build them one like it? how much does it cost to build and maintain a site like this? About $5,000 for the hosting service, and another $5,000 for the 32TB i7000 GTX7080 gaming rig computer that sits here on my desk and that is required to run it and keep it online. So, no, before you ask or ever consider it, it's almost impossible for a beginner to even attempt to build, host, or serve a site like mine. I'm a major gaming geek, building codes is something I do, and building websites is an offshoot of that. No I do not build them for other people. No I do not build them for other people. Writing the massive codes for a site like this takes months.

Did you start your author website before you wrote your novel, during or after?

I published my first book in 1978, before the internet was invented, so... after.

My author home page was started in 1996 so it's a very old website, and I add 1 to 5 new pages to it every day, thus how it passed 10k pages.

What type of content do you share on your author website?

The site tagline says it all:

Helping Authors Write Weird, Bizarre, Absurd, Psychedelic Horror-Fantasy Since 1996!

I have the joys of being one of the oldest author-devoted websites on the internet, meaning I have the joys of also being one the single most plagiarized and pirated authors on the internet. Bloggers are constantly scraping content off my site. You can frequently find stolen copies of my how to write erotica articles being sold low price of just $399.99 on the Warrior's Forum. A large amount of my week, every week, for years on end, is devoted sending take down notices to thieves who are continually stealing content off my site.

I’d love to hear your reasons for (or for not) building an author website.

I'm an obsessive person with a big ego and schizoaffective personality disorder. I can't do anything and not go huge with it, my brain doesn't work in anything less than massively huge, blindingly pink, and boldly overpowering. I'm a nightmare to live with - everyone whose ever tried will tell you that. Oh, by the way, those pictures of me in CosPlay... I'm OtherKin, ElvenKin to be specific. I dress like that every day. No, I've never meet a sequin I didn't love. Yes I am a huge Liberace fan. Yes, I do wear rhinestone ballgowns everyday, all day long. Even around the house and going shopping at WalMart. I haven't owned a shred of normal clothes since 1987. Yes that is my daily driver, yes it does have 2.5million marbles glued to it, yes my motorhome does glow in the dark. Yes I did write quotes all over my car and my motorhome. When I had a house, I used to write on the walls there too - inside and out, also the floors and ceiling.

When you start looking at the (14,378) photos on my website you suddenly start to realize... OMG... NOOOOOW I understand why she writes the things she does...and THAT, that my friend, that is why I have that website.

I am filled with overbearing, constant non stop energy, the need to create constantly never goes away, I barely ever sleep. I can and often do go up to 5 days in a row between sleep.

I type 91 words a minute, that's 5,000 words an hour and I spend on average writing 8 hours a day. The fastest I ever wrote a novel beginning to end was 17 hours. It's not something I can very well control either.

I wrote 130 novels and 2,000 short stories and it wasn't enough, my brain simply doesn't shut off, it just keeps going and going and going like and energizer bunny, endlessly pushing me to write more and more for no reason at all...

I needed a break from writing fiction, so I built a website to start write non-fiction articles, to help other writers, seeing how so many writers come to me asking how to be a prolific, high word count writer.

The short answer is without schizophrenia you really can't even begin to write on my level, but, you know, if you want to try, hey go ahead... so I started writing article to tell people how I did my writing method.

That was April 1996. It's now 22 years and 10,000 webpages later. Do you know how many words that is? My articles average 5,000 words. That's 50million words. That's in addition to the novels and short stories. I told you, I can't stop writing. Sometimes I wish I could. I can be exhausting, when your brain makes you write none stop all day long. But that's it. That's why I made my website.

If you've never had or know someone who had schizoaffective personality disorder, then you can't even begin to imagine what it is like to live with a disorder of the brain that causes you to write non-stop like this. But if you have or know someone who has it... well, then you know what I live with.

My website has expanded far beyond what it started out as though. It now promotes my books as well, and has become a place for me to give my readers "extra stuff" about my characters, their world, and of course all the artwork of the characters that can not fit in books. As wild as my site is, fans of my work love it. And my habit of posting announcements of my daily articles on my FaceBook and Twitter and Tumblr, I have a "notification squad" of readers who just show up at my site every day, to read whatever the latest pages to be added to my site are.

Because my fans, know to look to my site daily for updates, I now have book updates on my site, something it didn't originally have.

Sales wise I rank as one of the top 10 authors of Monster Porn, Absurdism, and Bizarro Horror. My website is largely used as a gateway point for my fans and readers to have a way to connect with me, outside of the convention and CosPlay circuit. (I'm a CosPlayer and I do book tours in full CosPlay of my characters.) MOST authors of Monster Porn whom have contacted me asking me how I got my sales, have reported that they have struggled to sell even a dozen or more copies the first year, and after 2 or 3 years have yet to have a title sell 100 copies. Yeah... those ARE the type of sales figures you can expect. The only reason I get a higher rate of sales is because my blog has 300,000 email subscribers, and I've got 3million followers across my combined social media, due largely to my website being online since 1996, and my being a member of FanFiction.net for 20+ years.

I have enough of a following, a following that it took me 20 years to build, that I get a higher than normal rate of sales from my books. If you want to have the sale figures I do, in Monster Porn... post 90% of your stuff for free online, on Fan-Fiction.net, publish about 60% to 70% of the content of each of your novels free to read online, but don't publish any of the sex scenes online, don't publish the last 5 chapters online. If people like what's online and want to read the sex or find out how the story ends... they HAVE to buy the book. And thus my website becomes a way to drive traffic to my books.

If you are planning on using your website to promote your books, definitely consider posting free to read online sample chapters. That's HOW I get so many sales in Monster Porn. Look around this web site. You can read most all of the Quaraun novels for free online here on my website. But you won't find any of the sex scenes for free. You pay to read those. And you won't find the ending of any of the novels on here either, again, you have to pay for those. And people do. People get hooked on reading the chapters, so the buy the books.

If you are a self-pubbed author having a website is going to be the best way to get your books out there. If you want to have a few thousands or more sales instead of struggling to even reach 100 sales, that's what you have to do. Especially in Monster Porn, which is what II write. Monster Porn is not a popular or big selling genre. It's a hard genre to sell. You write it because you love it, not because you want it to become your income. I'm able to write Monster porn all willy nilly with no need for focusing on income because my partner has an income that allows me to write whatever genre I want with no need to focus on a big selling of income producing genre. People often see my psychobilly art cars and insanely over the top elaborate CosPlays, and they assume I pay for those things with my author income, and I don't. My books only bring in around $2,000 a year.

I’m launching mine in the new year and I’m going to be writing lifestyle type posts and short story fiction, as I’m at the editing stage of my first novel. I’ll definitely be sharing what does and doesn’t work for me so I can try to give back to the writing community :)

Yes!

Yes, definitely do.

Sharing content, experiences, etc, your fans, readers, and fellow writers will love you for it.







This article was originally written on: December 30, 2017

This page last updated on: December 30, 2017











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