But really I think that is sort of the message here. More often than not, readers are an easy bunch, we LIKE many things but we ‘need’ little. Lisa Kleypas had a very cute site with a picture you could scroll over to find info. Very cute – hated it. Her new site is much more simple. Julie Garwood has a very interesting site – if I had the time or want to screw with it to find info I wanted. I don’t.

Give us the info – book titles, backlists (printable text rocks for YOU and US), tell us what you are working on [be it out next week or in a year]. Give us a sample of your work – excerpts, free stories, out of print downloads for free or cheap. But really if a writer can’t be arsed to put that information out for me to easily find – unless I am already a fan – I am one to say screw it. There are a hella lot of books out, coming out and already on Mount To Be Read.

Monica McCarty has a trilogy coming out in July, I just yesterday deleted them off my to be bough list because her website was STILL ‘coming soon’ after over six months. Oddly enough going to get the link it looks like it is finally up. Will I read them, maybe at some point but I already have more books at this point than I can read for July and August. So it is no longer at my top of GET this NOW. Track it down, must read, get ARC or eARC, find out more about the author because too many others I wanted to know more about during the same time frame had the info up. This could be the bestest trilogy ever but if the author doesn’t care to get the info out there, why should the reader care?

Writers write… I would much rather have any writer working on their book(s) than spending hours out blog hopping or myspace hunting. The bells and whistles can be nice and fun at the same times they can be too much. And at the end of the day it is up to each author what they do or don’t do and how much of their time they can pony up for anything.

Of course I have a jane so what do I know ;)

Just installed the Wordpress Mobile Edition plugin and used this demo to check. Most excellent!

Opera Mobile Mini demo

Anyway, I think it’s working now after a little tweaking. Of course, since I don’t have Internet on my cell and rarely use the thing, what do I know.

Okay, I have a blackberry, too, but I’ve never read dearauthor.com on it or much of anything besides google and dictionary.com to settle arguments. So maybe I should. But I don’t want readers to think I’m being negligent because I don’t have such things.

But as I was writing this, I turned to my computer programmer boyfriend, who explained the entire idea: that a plug in is a little bit of code that allows a server to pull a modified version of a site into a device. Okay, I could add one to my web site to make it readable on a phone. I currently have flash on my site. So–I feel edified now by this entire post and conversation, and will write to my web maven.

Anyway, I hope readers don’t take offense at all the things authors do or don’t do. There’s a learning curve with this tech stuff.

Jessica Inclan

http://www.tutorialtastic.co.uk/converter.php

And it will convert your code snippet into text-friendly visibility. You can then use the CODE button in your WP dashboard to add it to the blog post.

Also, Firefox has an add-on called Web Developer that has a lot of handy tools for viewing and building websites. Under its Miscellaneous tag, it has an option to preview a page in small screen rendering. I’ve been checking my sites with that (though I’ll try the Opera utility too.) Firefox users can download the add-on here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

This from a writer who is just now–finally–at last–having her web site redone. (And who can’t imagine being wanted by someone’s smart phone no matter how hard she tries!) Am I less than writerly when I don’t blog, don’t my-space, and still find it difficult to carve out writing time? …sigh…
EC (who seriously needs a reident techno-geek)