On publisher-sponsored website toolkits and ownership
This morning I read that Random House is preparing to launch AuthorsPlace, a community site in which RH authors can build (and update) their own websites, and optionally join groups of other authors.
Is it a good idea to use these toolkits to build your web presence?
It’s great to see Random House acknowledge that authors’ website are important and devote some resources to help. We’ve seen other publishers try this, too — Harlequin tried something similar a couple of years ago, as I recall.
Except… what happens to the author’s website when she leaves Random House?
In the late ’90s, we saw a number of very glitzy, publisher-sponsored websites built on the authors’ domain names. They were gorgeous, but they were often abandoned after their initial launch — clearly, the publisher had moved the web designer to someone else’s project — and the websites never got updated to reflect new releases. Worse, the sites listed only the books the authors had published with that publisher. Backlist published elsewhere? Didn’t exist, as far as these sites were concerned. New projects with a different house? These websites didn’t know anything about them — and neither did the readers.
One of our mantras is that you must own your website. You. Not your web designer. Not a fan who offers to maintain it free of charge. Not your publisher. All those people can certainly contribute, but you have to be responsible for the site. You need to know where the domain is registered, so you can make sure it doesn’t expire and so you can point it to a new hosting company if your old one falls down on the job. You need to be the contact person for that hosting company, even if you’re going to farm out the technical work to someone else, and you need to have the master password so you can change it if you decide to dump your web designer. You need to know how to make changes to the site’s content, so that if one of your contributors makes a mistake, you can correct it.
Don’t let someone else register your domain or host your site. Get all the technical help you want, but you need to keep control of those two things.