Author Website!

It took years, but I finally swooped up the domain for my author website! And now that it’s up and running, I’ve pulled together this post that describes what an author website is and some guidance for how to get and make one!

Here’s my new author website! Check it out: RebeccaMcLaughlin.com

What is an Author Website?

An Author Website is like any other kind of website for a business. Like any good website, three things should be abundantly clear:

• What is the business?
• What is being sold?
• How to interact/purchase/learn more/etc.

For an Author website, the answers to these question are pretty straightforward:

• You, the author, are the business
• Your books (and any other related services, like author visits, events, other services you sell)
• How to learn more about the books, how to purchase the books

In short: The business is you and the product is your books.

Things You Should Know

Getting your very own website typically involves two main purchases:

1. Domain Name
2. Web Hosting and Site Design

Depending on which platform you use for web hosting, you may get a year or so of a free domain. There are a lot of site builders and hosting platform out there (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, GoDaddy, to name a few), so you’ll want to shop around and see what prices and packages work for you. Most of these allow you as the site owner to use drag-drop interfaces to design the site, though you could consider tacking on a third cost of Site Design if you want to hire a person or company to do that work for you.

Domain Name

What is a domain? A domain is the web address, essentially, as well as the server and location that the website itself is stored. Often, you can have the domain purchased through any number of domain services (GoDaddy, BlueHost, along with most of the platforms for site builders and hosting.

A Good Domain Name for an Author Website

A good domain for an author is typically your author name (which might be your legal name or pen name, depending on which you publish under). If your name isn’t available, it’s not uncommon to append “author” or “writes” or “books” to the domain name. I waited literal years in the eaves for my full name to become available as a domain, but if it wasn’t available, here’s some options I may have considered:

• rebeccamclaughlinwrites
• rebeccamclaughlinbooks
• rebeccamclaughlinauthor

Site Design

Site Pages

You want three core things in an author website (the links below are to the corresponding pages on my site, if you want an example of what it can look like):

• A Home page with recent news or highlights for your most recent book or product.
• An About page with details about you as an author (your author bio, typically), along with any other desired additional details. You can include contact information here or on a separate contact page.
• A Books page with information about your books. It is also a good idea to have one page PER book, and the menu for the books on your site’s global navigation should have a dropdown menu that navigates to each book or series.

Optional pages:

• Contact page, for dedicated contact information, on which you could put a contact form, contact details, and any other social media or landing locations for you as an author on the internet.
• Blog, which could either link to an external blog or a blog managed on the site.

General Site Design Guidance

Here are some general tips for making a website in general:

Image and Visuals — You don’t want to inundate your site with images, but you definitely need them! There’s an abundance of free stock imagery out there that is bookish or authorial, but the best images are the ones that are of you and your books!

Keep it Simple — You want a good balance of empty space, small chunks of text, and images. It can be tempting once you have a site to fill it with all the good stuff you want to put on it, but you don’t want to scare visitors off with too much stuff going on.

Let’s Write Outside Today (during COVID)

Self-isolation is important, social distancing is crucial, but don’t forget to get exercise and daylight and to find and create sources of joy!

Deadlines & Time Management – Author Q&A

Being an author or writer means committing yourself to deadlines, time management, and a life of stress… or does it? Here are some Questions and Answers all about time management and deadlines!

Tips for Working with Migraines

I get migraines, and they suck. Sometimes, you have to work through them! Here are the things I do to try to keep working on tough days.

I Should Be Writing… but instead…

When I get feedback, my gut reaction is to read it and then promptly run away. (I also read my edit letters in reverse order, which is a totally strange quirk that I’ll talk about another day.) I need time to process the feedback and absorb it before I decide how to tackle it. And sometimes… I run toward another form of artistic expression other than writing! Here’s a time lapse of the hour after I received my most recent short edit letter!

Publish Day! for NAMELESS QUEEN

Here’s all my clips from Instagram on the day my first book, NAMELESS QUEEN, was published! It was a true, true honor to be able to debut in such great company, with all of the other spectacular authors debuting and with the support of so many people. Rewatching this video makes me smile and laugh and cry a little, and I’m so happy I get to keep these memories. I’m sure they’ll come in handy when I need a balm against the ego-burning madness of revisions as I continue to work on my second book!

Unboxing my Author Copies of my Book, NAMELESS QUEEN!

My first book gets published in just a few days, and I got my Author Copies (a box of my own books) in the mail this week! They are GORGEOUS and I am so excited to be able to share it with you!

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INTERESTED IN READING MORE? I read Chapter 1 out loud here!

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My Book:

~ [$] Preorder/purchase NAMELESS QUEEN

~ [+] Add it on Goodreads

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Social Media:

~ Twitter: https://twitter.com/McRebecky

~ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcrebecky/

~ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/McRebecky/

My Publishing Journey 2010-2020 – How I Became an Author

Happy New Year’s Eve! Not only are we starting a new year and a new decade, we’re starting it off with as many 2010-comparison memes, Gatsby throwbacks, and hope for the future as possible! And for me, the 2020s is starting off with pretty much my dream coming true. My first book, a YA fantasy about a thief who takes the throne, NAMELESS QUEEN, comes out in exactly one week on January 7, 2020!

This is a heck of a way to start off the next decade of my life. I’m so excited! Let’s take a look at how I got here:

In 2010, I was graduating high school and starting college. I had just finished writing my first book, and I had Big Dreams of writing more in college. I wasn’t quite ready for publishing. I knew enough to know I could be better and that my skill level wasn’t where I wanted it to be to debut. So, over the next four years of college, I wrote four more books. Then, in 2014, just as I graduated and started working at my first job, I started writing the first draft of NAMELESS QUEEN. It was my first foray into first person present tense narration, and even as I wrote it, it felt different. I knew as I wrote it that this would be my first time properly trying to get published.

I revised it through the first half of 2015 and was accepted into Pitch Wars, which is a mentorship program with an agent showcase at the end. I worked with the gloriously ambitious and kickass author, Laura Steven (EXACT OPPOSITE OF OKAY; A GIRL CALLED SHAMELESS) for two months. From the showcase, I got multiple offers from literary agents, and I accepted Peter J. Knapp, who is the cheeriest and most encouraging and best agent. Within weeks, we were on submission. Within a day, we had our first offer.

NAMELESS QUEEN sold at auction within a week to Penguin Random House, Crown Books for Young Readers. But then the contract boilerplate was being revised, and it didn’t get finalized and signed until August 2016. Then began revisions! So. Many. Revisions.

A whole lot changed in the manuscript, culminating in an 80% rewrite over two months in early 2018.

Yeah, you heard right. Almost TWO YEARS of revisions with my editor. Oof. It just goes to show that sometimes things move fast and sometimes they move sllllloowwwwww. In the first half of 2018, they finally settled on what the publish date would be: January 7, 2020. We could have *maybe* made it into Fall 2019, but we still had to do line edits and copy edits, and ultimately they really wanted the ARCs to have the final cover design on it, so they pushed the publish date out just a bit farther. This was a long cry from the original aspiration “late 2017” publish date that my agent and I expected back when we sold the book. But life is long and most of it is outside of our control. In some ways, I felt held back and stunted by this drawn-out timeline, but that has more to do with the cultural obsession of achieving “success” ASAP. The book needed 2 years of revisions, and so that’s what it took.

Needless to say, however, I don’t want to repeat that timeline, if at all possible. So, at my editor’s suggestion, I’ve hired a lovely freelance editor to work with closely on the first and second draft of my next book under contract. In late 2018/early 2019, I got a pitch approved for my second book. I wrote the first draft between August 2019 and October 2019. Now I’m working on the second draft after some revisions planning with my freelance editor, and I’m aiming to go into the New Year with a plan to finish Draft 2 by the end of January. As of now, I’m 17% through the manuscript. It’s a totally different world than NAMELESS QUEEN, so it’s a lovely stretch in a different direction after spending *checks watch* over half of the decade working on a single book.

I’m swinging into the New Year with A LOT of determination and ambition. I can’t wait to share NAMELESS QUEEN with you, and I can’t wait to continue on this Author Journey. Books are a joy, and I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to have a life where I get to write and share them with you!

Happy New Year’s Eve, my friends. And Happy 2020!

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• You can add Nameless Queen on Goodreads
• Preorder NAMELESS QUEEN here
• Reach out with any questions over my social media.

Working/Writing Around the Holidays

Holidays can bring family and joy and festivity, but it can also bring vacation time from day jobs and free time to yourself. This isn’t true for everyone every year. But when it is, *chef’s kiss*, it’s a beautiful time.

Here on December 28th, I’m in a wonderful position of being on vacation until the New Year. Not all of my friends, family, and coworkers are so lucky, and it wasn’t more than a couple years ago when I was a contractor still and didn’t get any paid vacation or holidays at all. So, I cherish this time! Time to be around family, sleep in, enjoy good food and company, panic about the 10-day countdown to my book’s release, and spend some quality time with the revisions of my second book.

I’m in yet another unique situation where I’m working on Draft 2 of my second book, but I’m doing so with a freelance editor—and we don’t have a deadline. This isn’t to say that I should (or could!) be taking my sweet time with it until the heat death of the universe. On the contrary, I am a self-starter in terms of deadlines, and I can’t abide a deadline-free life. That’s one of the reasons I have done National Novel Writing Month in the past, because it imposes a one-month, 50,000-word deadline.

But I also don’t want to run myself ragged in the week that I have to reboot before the start of 2020, when just as many things will be pulling me in just as many directions. January, my friends. January.

January itself heralds the release of my debut book, NAMELESS QUEEN, on the 7th of the month. It also marks the release of a project at my day job that I spent the last year on. It also will involve me going to places around lower Michigan to sign stock and indie bookstores, signing at least 500 copies of my book (FOR SECRET REASONS!), and pondering the fate of the new decade.

January. I will survive it. Everything will be fine.

What I’m really saying is that I believe in deadlines as a powerful form of motivation, and here are my deadlines for the end of this year, my “End of Year To Do list” prior to my “2020 TO DO LIST.”

END OF 2019 TO DO LIST

• Finish revisions to Chapters 1-3, and send them to my freelance editor, Ruth.
• Build my calendar for January 2020. (Dot journals are amazing!)
• Start revisions to Chapter 4-onward.
• Plan out my next two YouTube videos. (I have notoriously gotten to the Friday before the posting day and been like “Oh. Filming and editing. I should do that.”) I’m off for the holidays but want to be ready for next year!

Starting Draft 2 of Book 2! (Writing Vlog)

It’s weird to be working on Draft 2 of Book 2 before my first book is published, but here we are! My first book, NAMELESS QUEEN, is out on January 7, 2020. And my second book is well underway in drafting! 🙂