Announcements

Over the next few weeks I will be listing and elaborating on my best hints about whether and how to design and maintain an effective author site. These are some of the same topics I illustrate at length in my “AuthorSites” talks to writers’ groups, beginning with the talk I did last May for the Illinois chapter of SCBWI.

Author Sites: Hybrids

But before we begin I first have to say: Author sites — and I’ve designed and produced over two dozen of them to date — are tricky. Why? Because they are hybrids; they are part personal and part professional.

Your site is personal because as a writer, there is always a part of you in your work. In fact, your site needs to be personal because discovering something of the author-person is one of the main reasons some of your visitors googled you and found the site in the first place. If you are going to place yourself on the web, you need to be prepared to share.

Your site is also a powerful promotional tool for your work. Teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents, editors — people responsible for getting books into the hands of book-lovers — all are potential visitors to your site. These visitors will be looking for signs that you are a professional, someone who can be trusted with a child’s sensibility or an avid reader’s attention.

Straddling Conventions

There are conventions regarding personal sites (it’s probably okay and maybe even expected to post pictures of your dog) and conventions about professional sites (it’s probably not okay and maybe even a downright bad idea to post pictures of your dog).

There’s no one-size fits all rule for where you, the author seeking to put up a site about yourself and your work, should place yourself on the continuum of personal-to-professional. We can probably, in the comments and in future articles, come up with some guidelines, but all I am asking of you here is to begin thinking about the balance you want to achieve. I’ll touch more on this as we go along.

It’s always nice when fledgeling blog gets noticed. Okay, true enough that Wild Keys has been around since 2003, been blogspotted by MSNBC and the likes of Mark Bernstein and Jill Walker, but it’s followed a very interrupted and mult-url-ed path.

The current design is my mod of Chris Pearson’s first “pro” design, Thesis. I chose to use this theme now that I’m using WordPress because Chris’ previous work is so fine and his design and markup goals and philosophy are so similar to my own. Thesis itself bore a striking resemblance to the redesign of Hit Those Keys that I recently deployed, so the framework seemed like an ideal and timely choice as I get comfortable with WordPress as a publishing platform. So, yay. Thanks, PJ, for the kudos.

There’s a new website on the block: author Courtney Sheinmel, whose novel My So-Called Family debuts in the fall, commissioned me to design and produce her site. We launched last night.

The creative brief was fun and a challenge. We chose to draw inspiration for the design from something meaningful of Courtney’s: her grandmother’s china.

Of course this wasn’t translated literally–I aimed for a mood and a bit of old-fashioned elegance. The gilding on the teacup became the outlines of the content areas, headlines, initial caps and logomark. The row of dots along the rim of the cup, reminiscent of egg-and-dart moldings, became the pattern that trims the top and bottom of the page. The green accent color, so felicitously also the dominant color in the bookjacket, became a unifying element:

Happy birthday to design client Donna Gephart’s As if Being 12 3/4 Wasn’t Bad Enough, Now My Mother is Running for President!

Book info:

As if Being 12 ¾ Isn’t Bad Enough,
My Mother Is Running for President
Donna Gephart. Delacorte, $15.99 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-385-73481-3

Publisher’s Weekly has great things to say:

Even though her breasts are “the size of cherry pits” and her widowed mother-the governor of Florida and a frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primaries-is rarely around, wonderful things are happening for seventh-grader Vanessa Rothrock. She wins the school spelling bee, and love notes from a secret admirer appear in her locker. Vanessa is proud of her mother’s political success, but she grows weary of receiving motherly advice via telephone, e-mail and hastily scribbled notes. First-novelist Gephart adds a good degree of tension as Vanessa accidentally finds hate mail addressed to her mother; Vanessa is sure her mother is in imminent danger, but her mother-who happens to be meeting with Governor Schwarzenegger-explains that she receives dozens a day (”You should have seen the ones I got during the budget crunch,” says Gephart’s Schwarzenegger. “Half the state wanted to pummel me to death with oranges”). Soon afterward, Vanessa begins receiving threatening letters at school from someone who wants her to pressure her mother into dropping out of the race. Gephart maintains the humor even as the stakes rise; she also successfully captures life in the public eye. She delivers a diverting story that also gives readers an intelligent look at primaries, caucuses and nominating conventions.

NOTE: Two weeks ago, we launched Donna’s new website.

JenniferZiegler.net launched officially today. I’m proud of the site, and loved working with Jenn, who is smart/funny/gorgeous and a terrific writer.

We were striving for a fun retro look (”part 50s cocktail dresses and part cowboy boots”) and I think we nailed it. On the way I stumbled onto a new technique for recreating the look of 40s/50s magazine art.

If I can find time — who am I kidding? — I’ll try to work this up into a real article, but the quick and dirty hint is as follows: Magazine art.

Think four-color separation –C-Y-M-X. The image is actually created from four layers of the same photo: one set to grayscale, one to cyan, one to yellow and one to magenta. Selected areas on each layer were smudged and erased to create the effect you see above. Neat, huh?