McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

When to start an author website?

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Wordmaker:
You're right, 200 books does not a best-seller make. I sold nearly that in two months and I'm certainly no best-seller yet.

If I can offer you some very serious advice, time should not be the major deciding factor in your decision to self-publish. Yes, you can get your book out faster, but you risk rushing it and releasing it before it's ready. Self-publish because you want full creative control and can afford to invest money in hiring an editor, cover artist, and layout designer. Don't do it because you don't want to wait. You're just doing yourself a disservice.

Publishing takes time. I wouldn't worry about something being "current." You need more than a couple of years to see good sales and build up a name. If you're worried that your work won't be current anymore, maybe you should work on it to make it more accessible regardless of when you release it? After all, do you really want to release a book that, two years from now, people won't be interested in?

arianne:
I meant current in terms of reader trend, not in terms of content. For example, a few years back there was that big Dan Brown Da Vinci Code phase where everyone was buying thriller type books, and now the trend has moved on to things like paranormal romance and urban fantasy. I'm just worried that something paranormal romance I write right now will be buried among the future, say, high fantasy trend.

I certainly wasn't the biggest fan of self-publishing a few years ago, because I'd seen too many vanity writers (you've all met them. They're the people who write something terrible and think it's great because their mom and grandma and auntie have told them it's great, and then they go and self-publish it and try to sell you the stuff...) who used self-publishing as a sort of "woe is me, no one understands my art" shield. I think however that self-publishing is garnering more respect and attracting a much better class of writer these days, so I've been looking into it as an option.

The main thing is to really just write something that's worth reading, I guess :)

Wordmaker:
Absolutely. Just as I would never advise anyone to try and write to fit current trends, I would say not to worry that your book won't be as popular 2-3 years down the line. People will read good books, regardless of trends. Just make sure your book is the best it can be, and don't sweat it when it comes to the latest craze.

Looking at the trends, paranormal romance has already passed from being the "in" thing. The next big thing was dystopian following The Hunger Games taking off, but even within a year, people were saying the genre was on the way out. The fact is, people who guess what the next trend will be really are just guessing. They have no way to know what will and will not sell, and publishers understand that.

arianne:
I would think, though, that someone writing something "in vogue" would find it easier to find a publisher/agent, whereas someone writing a thriller might be told "no one reads these secret society things anymore".

My current work is very urban fantasy, and while there are some original elements it's not the sort of thing that people would think is super duper original (nothing new under the sun and all that) although I like my characters and the plot seems to be going as it should. But, as you've mentioned, the urban fantasy trend has now given way to Hunger Games type books and I'm slightly worried by that as it probably means that agents aren't actively looking for something UF :(

Some people have told me it helps if you have some sort of "fan base" before you publish, as this will interest publishers/agents marketing-wise, which was why I was thinking about author websites, and whether or not I should start one (even though as an unpublished writer I really don't have that much to say, either on the writing front, or on the publishing front. I could speak for hours about my characters, but as the book isn't published yet, details about my characters are unlikely to interest anyone)

Wordmaker:
You'd be surprised. A lot of agents are reluctant to take on more books in the trending genres because there's so much in the market it becomes a hard sell. Just try finding an agent for a book where your main character is, or is in love with, a vampire, for example. There's just so much out there since the Twilight craze started that lots of agents and publishers aren't interested unless the book brings something really new to the table.

That's one of the reasons why Locked Within focuses so much less on vampires. They're present in the setting, but the primary characters are not vampires. And even with that, some people said I was pushing it to try and get any book published that had even the barest mention of a vampire.

The problem is that so many people think that writing an "in vogue" book is the way to go that the market becomes saturated and readers become jaded.

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