It also makes it much easier to tell someone your site, for example, brandon can just say “go to brandonsanderson.com” and people will find it easily because its easy to remember and its easy to get first on the search results for “brandon sanderson”.

Readers could have a harder time finding Dan because “danwells.com” is already taken. In my opinion, if he had published as “Dan Butcher” for the horror genre for example, that would have been pretty cool.

If you have a super common name like “John Smith” and johnsmith.com is not an available domain name, you might want to really seriously consider using a pen-name so that when people search for you on the internet, they will easily identify your website and easily find you. So much better if your pen-name evokes the genre.

For howard, schlockmercenary.com is probably pretty good since a lot of writers may be more farmiliar with the name of the comic than the name of the author. Howard should probably register howardtayler.com though, which he could just redirect to the schlock site. It doesn’t look like anyone owns it now.

I don’t work in front of a computer, so I guess its not as big a deal. I don’t know.

Face time is still way more cool! Thanks guys!

Author sites should be an equal amount of marketing and audience interaction. Keeping current is important for any site and especially important for writers since most of their projects are at least a year in the making.

I love that the topics are relatively broad yet relevant and are more than just telling us to use Strunk & White. Plus the podcasts are just entertaining. We can tell that you guys are having fun all the while. Just wanted to thank you guys for some good information and a fun time.

Btw, if any of you guys are looking for help with your own sites let me know. It’s what I do to pay the bills while I steal away the nighttime hours fiddling with my manuscript. And since I am being laid off from said job, I may have some time to fill if anyone would like some help.

Who was that, anyway?

Put a small GIF image up on your site and let people reference it in their img tags.
Whenever you update that image, you need only wait for caches to expire before the updated image appears on all the other sites.

It could even be an animation of yourself writing pages and placing them in a pile, with the pile of paper acting as the bar. Copy paste a new page on the stack for every 5%, say.