Outbox Online

Website Design for Local Small Businesses

Kate McMillan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:59:33 +0000

Because I live in Portland, Oregon one type of project I regularly work on is for local Portland small businesses. I love working on local projects because helping great companies in my home town succeed also helps me & my community. And something nice about small business websites (regardless of where you’re located) is that good ones act as a 24/7 sales person working for you on the internet.

Simply, your goals (online and off) as a small business owner are to raise positive awareness of your services/products and increase the number of people who contact you and then hire you, or purchase your product(s).

On the internet, this means the desired result is being on the front page of Google results for your search terms, but also strategic placement of links to your site in places that list services contextually (eg: Angie’s List).

So how do you achieve this holy grail of searchability and being listed in the right place? Here are some pointers…

Hire someone to build or overhaul your website with your target market and business goals in mind. You can have the most beautiful website on the internet, but if it isn’t designed and built specifically for the people who you want to work with, it’s not working for you. And often, keeping things simple is best. If you’re going to lead more people to your website, make sure they know exactly what you offer and want them to do when they get there.
Design and build with searchability in mind. Make sure the text of your website, especially on your key landing pages, echoes the terms people will likely search for to find you. You don’t need an SEO guru or extensive research skills to do this, just think about word combinations and phrases that your target market will use, and make sure you use and address them in your website’s text and page headers. For example, if you’re a personal trainer looking for more female clients in your city, try titling your About page “[City Name Here] Women’s Personal Trainer [Your Name Here]“
Combine the aesthetic of your location with your area of expertise. When you’re targeting a local market with your website, you can leverage the aesthetic of your location AND the aesthetic of your chosen profession to gain instant recognition and identity for your site visitors. For example, there may be some visuals you think of that would pertain to a Florist’s website no matter where they’re located, but I’m sure you can also imagine that a Florist in Tuscon, AZ might be different than a Florist in Buffalo, NY — these visual cues will work to your advantage in the first few seconds site visitors are making up their mind as to whether your website is worth spending any time on.
Get listed locally. There are so many places you can list a local business, but Google Places is a great place to start. If you’re not already on there, you’re missing out on a wonderful, free marketing opportunity. Encourage your existing (happy) customers to review your services on places like Google, Yelp or Citysearch. Or if there’s a more appropriate site that lists Doctors or Contractors – get yourself on those lists. Then think a little more broadly — are there local bloggers who write up services like yours? Can you offer a promotion through a local magazine (with an online edition) that will help raise awareness? What about a Groupon? There are so many options here, sometimes you just need to get a little creative… what about doing a link exchange with other, complimentary local businesses?
Think about where your content lives. Your website will be your home base on the internet (at least for the foreseeable future), but if you had videos or photos that provided valuable information to your existing or potential customers, there are some great places to put them that will gain more exposure. YouTube is the natural place for video content — it allows you to easily embed your video content on your website or blog, just be sure to place a link back to your website in the description of the video on YouTube, and use the YouTube keywords. For photos places like Flickr, or if it pertains to your services a site like Houzz.com, are great places to host photos that will widen your reach.
Research your competition. If there’s someone in your town with similar services and they’re getting great search traction see if you can determine why. When you search for them where are they listed? What about the kind of information they provide on their website? Do they invest in online advertising? Sometimes just a short amount of time will tell you a tremendous amount of information about what you can do for your own website.

If you don’t already have a website for your business, you have a great opportunity before you to get started on the right foot. If you already have a website, take a critical eye to it — if you’re not getting the results you want out of it, think about what you can change to move things in the right direction. It might be a handful of simple things that have a profound result.

Author & Book Websites: What to Include?

Kate McMillan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:36:47 +0000

Many of the websites that I create are for authors and books. And while every project is different, and each project is tailored to the author or book in question, there are some similar elements I almost always recommend people include on their site Home pages – the most important landing page of the site. I’ll break it down by author sites and book sites…

AUTHOR SITES

Since author sites often feature many books, with lots of titles and cover art, and sometimes even widely varied topics, you want the aesthetic of the site to be fairly neutral to be able to showcase your books without competing with them. This also helps with the longevity of the site because you won’t have to redesign the next time you publish. You can certainly set a mood with the aesthetic, but you likely won’t take it as far as you would with a site dedicated to just one book. With that said, here are some specific recommendations regarding content:

Featured Project: Whether you are a first time author or have many title under your belt, there is always a book that either was recently published, or is about to be published. In the case that the book was recently published, promote it front-and-center with a large bookshot, an enticing blurb, and purchase options. Include a link here to a page where someone can read more about the book, or get some behind-the-scenes information or other promotional materials. And if you have a great review excerpt or testimonial – include it!
Other Titles: If you’re truly prolific, this can be the latest three titles, but if you’ve got a handful of books in your biblography, a short list of these titles with smaller cover shots will let people know they’re in the right place if they’ve read you previously, and also let them know about books they may not yet have read.
Bio Blurb: As an author site, people will want to know about you, the author! Include a professional headshot and a blurb about you that will lead off (via link) to a page dedicated to information about you.
Latest News/Events: If you’re promoting your book (and why wouldn’t you?!) you’re likely going to have interviews, blog mentions, reviews and other media coverage items you’ll want to share with your audience. There should be a full list somewhere else on your site that archives everything, but the Home page can feature the latest items so that site visitors can easily learn more about what you’ve been up to recently.
Appearances (as necessary): If you make appearances for book readings or signings, interviews or at conferences/professional events you’ll want to have a list of upcoming appearances so that your audience can easily find out the details they need to attend.
Most Recent Blog Post (as necessary): If your site has a blog (which is a great tool to build your audience) you can place an excerpt of the most recent blog post on the Home page that is dynamically updated every time you publish. This keeps the content on your Home page fresh, and encourages people to explore the blog further & engage with your content.
Social Media/Affiliation Links: Most people have social media profiles these days. Whether your preference is Twitter, Facebook or Google+ you’ll want to at least have a link to your profile(s) but ideally you have a Follow/Like/Add to Circles button right there on the page. Whether you also include the feed depends on how often it’s updated and whether you’re duplicating content found elsewhere on your website by doing so.
Social Media Sharing: Different than the links to your social media profiles, you want to make it super easy for people to share your website with their friends. This should be a simple one-click button that allows people to choose their sharing service of choice (Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc..) and pass the word around. Of course people can do this by copying/pasting your URL, but why encourage it and make it easy so that more people do it?
Newsletter Signup (as necessary): If you can commit to writing a newsletter, a newsletter signup is a must have — it allows you to keep in touch with your audience and keep them appraised of your latest goings-on. I recommend asking for an email address, no more — why risk a barrier to entry by asking for their full name or phone number? And an incentive to sign up is always nice — maybe the newsletter will include a promotion code for a discount on your latest book? If a newsletter isn’t your style, but you want to build an email marketing list to promote your future projects, an email signup with an incentive of a sneak preview of a future title or a bonus chapter would be great.
Bonus Materials: This is where you (and your website designer) get to be even more creative. Depending on the kinds of books you write, you might include a slideshow of photographs, or an audio file, or a YouTube video, or a quiz, or myriad other things that tie into the content of your books. Sometimes authors are experts in their field and their books are an extension of a larger career — in this case this is a great opportunity to include something interesting from the larger context of your career.
Contact Information: Ideally this lives in the footer of the entire site, but you want to make sure it’s easy to get in touch with you from the Home page. After all, if someone comes to your site interested in booking you for an appearance or interview and they can’t find how to contact you, that’s super bad for business!

BOOK SITES

There are many similarities between author and books sites, and many of the ideas above also apply to book sites. However, book websites have some special considerations including being able to focus on bringing the world of just one book to life:

Like with author sites, things like the bookshot, blurb, purchase options and testimonials are must-haves – but since you’re focused on the world of one book you can elaborate a little bit more. Perhaps you have an audio clip of you reading a chapter? Or a video trailer? Or an excerpt? or a slideshow? On an author site these things can be included on the internal page dedicated to a particular book, but on a book site they can live right on the Home page.
Many movie websites do a great job of creating atmosphere with the aesthetic of their websites. Granted, they have lots of visuals to work with already, but as the author of a book you’ve likely imagined what the world of your book looks like. Even if it’s something like “dark and moody” or “honest and trustworthy” — these ideas can help you and your web designer come up with an atmosphere of the site that acts as an extension of the book. Keep in mind here that you don’t want to go over the top and create a site that is creative but hard to navigate, or even view on a mobile device. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how people expect websites to work to create atmosphere.

I know these lists include LOTS of ideas — perhaps too much for a Home page you’re thinking? This is where working with a skilled web designer will help tremendously. By breaking these elements up into a grid with plenty of white space to keep it easy to parse, you can fit this content into a clean, easy-to-use design without compromise or overwhelm. Here are some examples of author and book sites I’ve worked on to illustrate these ideas:

Designing Your Email Signature

Kate McMillan — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:13:27 +0000

Understandably people want to extend their visual brand throughout their communication platforms – including email. But as anyone who has delved into designing for email knows, getting creative in email can be a challenge.

Often efforts at email creativity results in unintended layouts, different results across email programs, and broken images. So when you’re trying to present a consistent brand by using an email signature, how do you avoid these pitfalls? By keeping it simple.

Even if you manage your email in a browser (hello Gmail), you can’t count on the same kind of flexibility you have when designing for the web. So my advice is to make your email signature text-only, and to include a minimum of information.

It can be difficult to accept that NOT including your logo in your signature is the way to go, but if you do, here are some common results:

The logo gets sent as an attachment to the email and isn’t presented as part of the signature. This can make it difficult for your recipients to be able to determine when you’re actually sending them an attachment. And if you have your logo, a Twitter icon and other images, they’ll ALL get sent as individual attachments. Yikes.
Most email programs block images automatically (as a way to prevent spam), so it may not show up at all. And even if an email client doesn’t block images automatically, many email users have a setting to turn images off to keep their email clean and easy to read.
If your image (ie: logo) does show up, you can’t guarantee (even with HTML) the way it will be presented. The layout may end up being a mess, or the logo may end up displaying in the middle of the email.
If your entire signature is an image (including your name or web address), and IF it does display for the recipient, that information can’t easily be used by copying/pasting.

And beyond the logo issue, there’s the text formatting issue. Often you can spend time formatting your signature text just so — the right color, font and size — but many email programs will strip that out automatically, or worse, display it in a way you never intended.

Finally, there’s the content of the signature. We’ve all received emails with a signature that goes on and on — not only is their name and contact information included, but their address, phone numbers, fax number, Twitter and other social media profile links, favorite inspirational quote, privacy disclaimer, etc… Don’t be that person. Really think about your customers — what’s the minimum information someone might need to easily get in touch with you? Even if you’re active on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social sites – does that information really need to be in your email signature on EVERY EMAIL YOU SEND? In this web-savvy world, people will easily be able to find you online without a reminder in every email about how “connected” you are. Just like you wouldn’t overwhelm someone with a list of your connections and accomplishments each time you meet, the same is true in email.

Here’s my advice for what to include:

Your full name
Your company name/title (as appropriate depending on your business)
Your email address (even though it’s easy enough to see this in the email header, you want this here in case someone forwards your email)
Your phone number
Your website address (if any)

And that’s it. You may even be able to get away with less than that depending on your business! And this is just text, no formatting or images.

So if you’re reconsidering your email signature or are working to create one, just remember: keep it simple.

Getting Ready for Your New Website

Kate McMillan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:29:40 +0000

With so much competition for attention, how do you make sure your website rises above to make a great first impression? More than anything else, making strategic decisions for your brand by asking the right questions will ensure that decisions about design or messaging are made with your overall goals in mind. The result being not only the lasting impression you’re looking for, but cohesion between your company values and the website that represents them.

So what are these questions? Here’s a brief list to help get you started:

What’s unique about your company?
How would you briefly describe what your company does?
What’s your vision for your company’s future?
Who is your biggest competition?
Who is your target audience?
What’s the most important decision your customers make when it comes to choosing your company?
How do you think your company is perceived today, and what do you like and dislike about that?
Why do you want to have a new website, or have your current website redesigned?
Why will people visit your company’s website?
What do you want people to come away with after visiting your company’s website?

By answering these questions you’ll have lots of information to help inform the decisions you’ll make regarding your website, whether you’re building it yourself or hiring someone to do it for you. As you think about the messaging you’ll include on the site and how it will be designed, refer back to your answers to help guide your plans to make sure you’re serving your company well!

Website Creation: Sending Large Files

Kate McMillan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:34:21 +0000

There comes a time in the creation of every website where large files need to be shared among stakeholders. This might be when the website owner is sending content for the website to the web designer, or it might be when the web designer is sending mockups back to their client. Either way, email isn’t always the best way, and you don’t always want your work-in-progress mockups on the internet for all to discover. Plus, email software will often reject emails with huge attachments, and they can be unwieldy for all involved.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, there’s a wonderful service called YouSendIt.com. They allow you to send single files up to 100MB to people, who can then download the file using a link in an email they receive from the service for free. The recipient can download using the link in the email they receive for a handful of days, and then it expires.

It’s a wonderful, easy-to-use service.

If you need to send lots of files to someone, just zip them up and use YouSendIt to send the single zip file. This is a wonderful way to not only compress the size of the transfer, but to make it easy for the recipient to work with lots of files pertaining to one project.

Your operating system may already have an easy way for you to zip up files (Mac comes with one automatically), usually by selecting multiple files in your Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac), then right-clicking and accessing the “Archive” or “Compress” or “ZIP” function. If you don’t have a ZIP program on your PC, 7-ZIP (http://www.7-zip.org/) is a great, free program for the PC.

Outbox Online Relaunch!

Kate McMillan — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:57:36 +0000

It’s taken a long time, but the relaunch of Outbox Online is here!

About a year ago, I decided to recreate my website. I wanted to streamline the presentation and I wanted to use WordPress as my CMS. My own site, however, took a back burner to all client projects, so I worked on it in brief spurts. Recently I decided it was time to finally make it happen, so I updated the design slightly and spent nights and weekends putting it together. And here it is!

It’s not entirely finished, but it’s finished enough to launch. I’m hoping the new design will make it easier to understand what I do, how to get in touch with me, and see examples of my recent work.

In coming weeks I’ll be adding featured projects, providing a way to get a quote on a project, and eventually, a way to purchase a packaged semi-custom website. Stay tuned!

Creative Endeavors & Your Day Job

Kate McMillan — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:48:39 +0000

Many times those of us starting creative endeavors (starting a new business, writing a book, etc..) can only afford to do them while still at our day jobs. I mean, someone has to pay the bills, right? Plus there’s the cost of getting a new project up-and-running.

And in addition to setting aside time to work on your new project, you need to set aside time to work on the website it needs, the social media marketing it needs, the blogging it needs – and you need to sleep.

So, when people ask me how to juggle this in a limited amount of time, here’s my advice …

Delegate When Possible: Sure, you *can* do everything, but at the end of the day it’s about the success of the project, not whether or not you did absolutely everything yourself. Delegation can be small things like ordering in dinner all the way up to hiring someone to manage your social media marketing for you. Spend a week and look at where your time goes. And make sure to notice that time “being lazy” isn’t necessarily wasted – that hour watching TV after dinner may just be what’s keeping you sane — but there may be place in your schedule where you can combine two activities into one, or temporarily pay someone else to do (like clean your house or bring your groceries) until your new project is off-the-ground. If you can find just 2 hours a week, that’s a substantial amount of time in which to get things done.
Use Technology to Make it Easier: You may not know all of the ways technology can save you time, but there are numerous ways to save time with a little know how. For example, WordPress blogs can be scheduled in advance. So you can do all of your week’s blogging on a Sunday afternoon, scheduling posts to go live at various times straight through to the next Sunday. The same is true for posting to Facebook or Twitter — you can use a free application like HootSuite to schedule out your social media marketing. If your blog is integrated with your Facebook page (through NetworkedBlogs), each time one of your new blog posts publishes, it’ll automatically update your Facebook page without you lifting a finger. This way you can seem to be everywhere all the time, offering valuable into to your clients/customers, but working with a schedule that fits your life.
Forget About the Row of Ducks: I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be organized, thoughtful & strategic when it comes to your new endeavor, but you don’t need to have every bell and whistle in play before you get started. Figure out a priority plan for yourself. If you don’t have time to devote to a blog right now, or even a full website, then just get a single landing page up there with your critical information on it and a way for people to get in touch with you (or join your mailing list). Not only does this allow you to get started in stages, but it also lets you adapt and learn as you go.
Adapt Your Schedule: Similar to delegating, when analyzing your weekly schedule you may realize that by bringing your personal laptop to the office, then catching up on your new project in a local cafe with internet access during your lunch hour is possible. Or that getting up a half hour earlier gives you time over breakfast in the morning to get some emailing or writing in. Perhaps you can take public transportation to work rather than driving – leaving you time to read or write over coffee without worrying about traffic. What if you’re able to work-from-home on Fridays & use the time you would have used in your commute to get some project work done? You may need to be creative, but it *is* possible.

I’m not here to tell you it’s going to be easy, but I am here to tell you it’s worth it. And the skills you acquire while balancing a day job and a new endeavor will serve you well in the long term!

Before, During & After the Launch of Your New Website

Kate McMillan — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:03:25 +0000

You’ve assembled a great team to build your new website: Congrats – that’s huge! Besides providing content & monitoring their progress, what should you be doing to help the site succeed?

BEFORE LAUNCH:

Understand Your Audience. The content you create for your website, including your blog, is there to serve your existing and potential customers. How much do you know about them? Do you want to evolve your customer base? What have they come to expect? Do your research to make sure you can easily answer these questions. Not only will it get you started in the right direction, but it’ll make it easier to measure the success of your site, and give feedback to the people designing and implementing it for you.
Get to Know Social Media. If you’re not yet familiar with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, it’s time to get to know them really well. This doesn’t mean that you need to utilize all of them, or that they’re aren’t other social networks that might work better for you, but you need to understand the basic rules of engagement for the big three. Once you understand what each offers, and how you define success for using them, you’re armed to make sure social media marketing is built into your platform from the ground up so that you’re getting the most out of them.
Gather Some Testimonials. Whether you offer a service or a product (or both), you’ll want to have a handful of testimonials you can use throughout your platform to build confidence. Ask your existing customers what they liked best about working with you, or what differentiates your product from other similar products. If you don’t have the basis for testimonials just yet, don’t worry – you can provide inspirational quotes yourself as the founder of the company as placeholders. The goal is for your site visitors to easily recognize themselves in these highlighted snippets of text.
Think About How People Will Get in Touch With You. Will you offer an email address? A form? A phone number? A newsletter signup? Build your email lists, but also organize your ports-of-call so that your communication is streamlined and clear. Consider a temporarily landing page that offers this info & acts as a teaser for the larger site launch.

DURING LAUNCH:

How Will You Announce? If you’ve spent some time building an email list, here’s the perfect chance to use it! What about a social media press release (pitchengine.com)? If you’re targeting a regional audience, what about local newspaper or radio? Are you ready to build some buzz on Facebook? Make sure you have a punch list lined up so that you can easily put everything in motion on the big day.
Consider Having an Event. It may be a “real life” event with wine and cheese for local customers, or maybe it’s a webinar, or a 1-day sale. If you create an event around the launch of something new it will have more lasting impact, and gives you a reason to celebrate that people can get behind. Of course it’s exciting for you to have a new website – but how can you make it exciting for your customers?
What About an Incentive? This may be tied to your launch event (see above) – but offering a discount or a freebie is a great way to get people “in the door.” Existing customers like when they are rewarded for their business, and everyone likes getting something for free. It builds good will and is something people are likely to share with their friends.
Update Your Collateral. Make sure your email signature, business cards, etc.. have the latest/greatest information on them. If your site is brand new, be sure there’s a URL listed everywhere. If you’ve rebranded – make sure the rebranding carries throughout your entire marketing platform.

AFTER LAUNCH:

Check In! It’s so important to measure the success of your investments – it gives you the information you need to decide where to put your time, energy and money in the future. Make sure you’re hooked up with site analytics.
Keep it Fresh. Blogs and social media outlets won’t work for you if they’re stagnant. Have a plan-of-action for updating your venues regularly. Consider a regular schedule for yourself for updating everything, and a regular schedule for incentives to keep people coming back again & again.
Reach Out & Stay Flexible. Seek out people via blogs or social media and become a resource for them. Give your new ventures some time and space to succeed, but be willing to pull the plug and try something new if it’s clear there’s no momentum. For example, if you’re launching a new webinar series – make sure you’ve got a handful of them lined up and shout them from the rooftops (so to speak). But if you’re not getting even a nibble of interest, try something new. What about video tutorials?
Don’t Obsess in a Bad Way. Measuring your success or failure day-to-day is setting yourself up for insanity. Sure, things move fast on the web, but try to balance your short-term assessments with some longer-term ones. If your site traffic is down by a few visitors one day the week after your launch, it doesn’t mean the overall upward trend isn’t valid!

New websites are launched daily by the thousands – some with a whimper, and some with a bang. Optimizing your approach to your website launch can get you started on the right foot, and give your investment its best chance for success!

Effective Social Media Campaigns

Kate McMillan — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 21:05:29 +0000

Social Media! It’s everywhere! It’s on everyone’s mind! Everyone is talking about it!

Some of it is hype & some of it is truth. I often get asked to distinguish the two, and almost everyone wants to know the “magic formula” for social media advertising success. While there are certainly some things you can do to gain success, there is no magic bullet or single prescription. And that’s the beauty of it. Social media is about people and communities, and each one is different.

Here’s an interesting link that describes some effective, recent social media ad campaigns: http://mashable.com/2010/09/14/social-media-campaigns/

When you look through the projects discussed there, it’s easy to think “Well, of course Gap and Starbucks have great social media ad campaigns! But not all of us have the time and/or boku bucks it can take to run a killer social media campaign. What do *we* do?”

My advice: learn from the best & play to your strengths. If a company like Starbucks; a nameless, faceless international corporation, can create content that feels sincere and personal, just imagine what a small business can do! Small business employees are close to their product/service – they’re involved in multiple aspects of the company – the kind of stories and experiences they can bring to a social media campaign are priceless. Also consider how accessible a small business is – if I can login to Facebook and contact the founder of a company with a question and get a quick answer, that’s a level of service and access that leaves me wanting to participate again and again. You don’t need a huge graphics budget & you don’t need expert coding skills. If you need help to get your brand established, or a brief consult with an experienced professional to design a strategy for you, a small investment with a skilled web designer is all it takes to get you up and running.

Clever Internetizens: Sara Ryan

Kate McMillan — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:59:22 +0000

This post starts a new series: “Clever Internetizens” — it will be a series of interviews with people on the web who have a great web presence. They utilize their websites and social media effectively across a variety of disciplines. Today I’m talking with author & librarian, Sara Ryan (http://sararyan.com). Sara has written two novels, Empress of the World and The Rules for Hearts, and a bunch of comics including the series Flytrap. She’s currently working on a graphic novel for DC Vertigo called Bad Houses.

Did you have a website before you published your first novel? If so, what made you have one?

I was in grad school at the dawn of graphical web browsing. As soon as I learned how to ftp and change file permissions, I set up what was then known as a Personal Home Page. (Old. School.)

I used it mainly to recommend things I liked.

• How long have you had the website that you have now?

I’ve had sararyan.com since 2001 (here’s a snapshot via the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20010219040125/http://www.sararyan.com/). The design has evolved considerably since then.

• How did you decide what it should look like?

I knew I wanted a sort of collage/bricolage appearance, because I wanted to be able to add images relating to new projects without necessarily changing the whole design. And I think the site’s retro/antique look is paradoxically less likely to feel dated over time.

I also asked my readers; the Flickr and LibraryThing widgets and the prominence of the blog on my frontpage came as a result of their feedback.

And finally, I worked with highly skilled code monkey Space Ninja (spaceninja.com) to develop the details of the look-and-feel and make sure the site worked on different platforms.

• How often do you update it?

It varies wildly — sometimes I post several times a week, sometimes I take a hiatus for as long as a month. Probably the average is about once a week.

• How do you use it to publicize the work that you do?

Like most folks, I announce events and link to interviews. I also make a lot of work available on the site. I have several short comics that you can read online (you can also buy them as chapbooks), and I’ve recorded myself reading my first novel, Empress of the World, in its entirety as a series of podcasts. I’m working my way through my second novel, The Rules for Hearts, too.

• How else do you publicize your work?

I like Twitter.

I’m on Facebook as well, in a low-key way. I respond to comments on my wall, but I’ve never set up fan pages for my books or used it to send event invitations. I can’t quite bring myself to cross that particular self-promotional Rubicon.

And I crosspost my blog entries to LiveJournal. It’s not as popular as it once was, but a fair number of folks still hang out there, especially genre writers, so there’s a certain sense of community.

My overall approach: I don’t force myself to participate in spaces that, for whatever reason, don’t feel right. Lots of writers are on GoodReads; I’m not. Lots of writers have Google alerts set up for their names and book titles; I don’t. And sure, I might miss out on seeing some nice reviews, but I also don’t have the stress of wondering whether a particular mention will turn out to be depressing or delightful.

• How do you balance and prioritize the tasks of writing and self-promotion?

In a sense, the balance is easier for me to maintain than for some of my friends who write full-time on a book-a-year schedule. They always need to simultaneously promote the current book and write the new one.

I have longer stretches between books, so the level of self-promotion ebbs and flows fairly organically. And sometimes I’ll take a hiatus from the blog (as I did in August) to devote more time to writing.

• I love that you’ve posted individual podcasts of you reading your work – what prompted you to do that?

I noticed that my computer had GarageBand!

Seriously, I like reading out loud, and podcasting seemed like it would be easy and fun — which it has been, in part because I, um, don’t worry too much about sophisticated audio production values, e.g. I just record and post.

I started the Empress podcasts as a way to build up to the publication of Rules, and continued because people seemed to enjoy them.

• You regularly blog about other authors and books you recommend – what prompted you to do that?

I read a lot; I like talking about what I read with friends; I like treating blog readers as friends.

• How much do you share about projects you’re working on before they’re published? Does it help your process at all?

I share much less than I once did. I’m less likely to report on word or page count, more likely to discuss process in a broader sense. I wrote a while back on the differences I’ve observed in revising a graphic novel script vs. a prose novel, and I have a post in the works about unexpectedly useful reading.

I think the danger of talking too much about a project-in-progress is that readers may wonder what’s taking you so long (!) and/or get tired of it before it even appears. And publishers often move a book’s release date, so if you’ve said Hey, it’s totally coming out on September 1st!, and then you find out it’ll actually be February 27th of the following year, well, that is no fun for you or your readers.

• What’s your advice to authors when it comes to their online presence?

Have one. At minimum, basic information about your books, a bio, upcoming events. Make it easy to contact you if you want to be contacted. In terms of social media, do what interests you. Don’t blog if it feels like homework, don’t tweet if it feels like a waste of time.

That said, don’t be afraid to try something new, either. It took me a while to get the point of Twitter, now I find it nigh-indispensable.

Thank you, Sara, for your thoughts and advice to those looking to create or optimize their web presence!