I have several authors whose books are coming out in the next few seasons, and so I have been giving a lot of thought to an author's image and participation on the web. I am dead positive Caren has blogged about websites before, but I thought the topic bears repeating and emphasizing. So here's my take.
Elana Roth CJLA Info: Promotion, websites As you may have noticed, we've spent the last few months relaunching our website and blog. It's something that took a while because there was so much to include. Since it's such a big part of who we are as a company and as agents, we really wanted to figure out how to best present the information we have as well as how to keep up with changing technology online. I think we figured out the best of all worlds: having a website that presents the static information like our submission policies, our authors, and books we've sold, having a blog that allows us to publish our ideas on writing and publishing in an easily accessible way to interested readers, and using social media like twitter and facebook to reach a wider audience. We've also been toying with the idea of podcasting interviews with our writers as well as editors and other agents (Harper Studio does this particularly well). Our focus is always on our audience--that is the individual readers who visit our site. Writers need to keep this in mind as well when establishing their web presence.