Original post January 8th, 2015

We’re up to #8 in our list of different careers an
Indie Author has to take on nowadays. (Correction – any author)

Website
Manager – at the beginning of our journey, we were all told
that having a website was one of the most important choices we could make when
starting out. Having a blog was a preference but the website was a must.

I believe it’s true. In fact, I was also warned that
blogs could be lost and I know that to be heartrendingly true because it’s
happened to friends of mine.

But it won’t happen to a website. That is your storefront
so to speak – the permanent office for your business. It’s your home base where
readers and fans can always find you. Therefore it matters.

A lot!

I’ve had my website renovated recently and it’s
become a very efficient place for folks to visit and find out about me. The Home page explains about my start as an
Indie Author and my achievements since the beginning. Next is the About page with my bio and picture,
which, by the way, I’ve never had professionally done. My husband was so proud of
the photo he took of me; I didn’t have the heart to replace it with one taken
by a stranger. Following this is the most important page. My Book page listing all my work in the appropriate series, excerpts for
most and here we’ve added all the links to the various venues to make purchasing easier.

The subsequent two pages News and Extras are
pretty self-explanatory. I actually found it difficult to fill these spots and
I know I need to make more of an effort…will do…one day! I will….!

Then bringing up the rear is the Contact page.
Again, this needs to be kept up to date. You won’t believe how many wonderful
people have written to me from this e-mail address that I only use in two
places – on my website and in the back of my books.  So cool to open an e-mail from a reader who’s
contacted me to say how much they loved a certain book. Precious!

Now that I’ve gone through the website’s structure (mine),
I hope you can see how much information is available under one address. It’s
great, right? But… someone has to manage it. I do everything on my blog, but for
my website, I just couldn’t face the learning curve and so I hired a webmistress called Rae Monet. She’s fabulous, efficient
and so fast that I never have to wait long for my updates to appear.

Except… these updates have to be instigated by – you
guessed it – ME!!! She only does what I ask her to do. It’s still up to little ole me what
material shows up there and how it’s placed. I won’t even begin to delve into
search engines and the likes or how to get your website in the forefront on
Google. That’s a whole other post.

Just more chores for the overworked, underpaid,
stressed-out Indie author to deal with!

You gotta love this job. No… really! You gotta love
it!

Here’s a sneak peak of my new cover for I’m No Angel that’s just been released for Pre-order on Amazon. Will tell you more about the book in my next post 🙂