My friend and co-editor writes a regular art column for Realms of Fantasy magazine. I wasn’t aware, though, that they posted the entirety of her column, and the rest of their non-fiction, online. The latest of Karen’s columns to go up is “Romancing the Book“, a piece on Tony DiTerlizzi from the June issue. You should check it out. Karen’s great at what she does, and the piece is good.

Dashing small press publisher Gavin J. Grant gives an overview of how to start a small press over at Strange Horizons. A writer and editor of no small accomplishment, Gavin is also publisher at Small Beer Press, a smart, well-run outfit that produces some amazing books. The information he gives is useful, unaffected and covers pretty much everything. The only thing that he probably doesn’t stress enough is that running a small press is for crazy people.

So, you’re an author who wants to set up a website so that you can communicate with your legions of adoring fans, schill for your product, and all that other good stuff. You are, however, not simply a commercial animal, so you want to reflect that you are fully in touch with your art. A website is the go, but you don’t want it to be just any old website, it has to be special, the Heironymous Bosch of websites.

Well, a respectful suggestion. Get over yourself just a little. A website is a communications tool. Use it. Be clear, be concise and be obvious. Make sure your site has obvious sections, set out clearly. Again, for what it’s worth, I think you could probably have the following sections on your site:

1. News
2. Biography
3. Bibliography
4. Appearances
5. Contact information

A couple other things. The news section should be the most prominent section on the site. Not necessarily on the home page, or the home page itself, but the first link in your navigation. The other stuff is less important. I’d also add a 300dpi photo of yourself to the biography section that can be downloaded for press and other purposes. Consider doing it for at least your most recent book too. This means people don’t have to contact you to ask, and you don’t have to spend time mailing them out. Be optimistic. Someone might actually want to write about you, and this would help. Have some contact information. It could be your publisher, your agent, or even you direct, if that’s what you want. But, the point here is to be somewhat accessible. If you don’t want that, then don’t have a website. I’d also see if you can run your news page as an .rss feed. Someone might want it, and it’s all good, honest PR.

There are probably other things I could add. You know, make sure that every page you have links back to your home page, don’t have a journal that doesn’t link to your main site and so on and so forth, but that’s enough for now. End of rant… Oh, and don’t get me started about publisher’s sites.

I don’t usually blog about websites. It’s what I do for a living, and lord knows, it’s enough to do it eight hours a day, without going on about it here. But, there are a couple things that are so dumb, that they just s@*T me. Here they are…

1. Do not use images in place of text. If you do then search engines will not be able to index the information on your page. A good example of this is the Black Clock magazine site. Nice magazine, lousy site. You could google for a month and never find it, so what’s the use?

2. Provide information people expect. If you are an author and you are putting up a web page add a “News” section. In a fit of foolhardiness, actually call it “News”. It will be something easy for interested folk to check and update. If you are feeling absolutely giddy, you could even see if you could syndicate the news page with an RSS feed or some such. Who knows, it could actually work for you.

3. Keep images to a minimum. Images are cool, but the world is not on a broadband connection yet. It’s just dumb to pointlessly pack a page with images. For examples, see here.

Oh, and I doubt anyone from the SFWA ever reads this site, but here’s an idea. Get all of your members to set up RSS feeds for their news, set up a news page on your site, and automatically you get to be one of the major SF news sites in the world. Seems obvious, no?

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was held this past weekend in Fort Lauderdale. Although you probably didn’t know it, it sounds like you and I would both have had fun there. Lots of cool interesting people, all talking about SF and stuff. One year I’ll make it.

This year the guest scholar was Australian writer and academic Damien Broderick. Damien is a really interesting guy who writes everything from hard sf to dense critical stuff, and a lot of it is really top notch. During the conference the IAFA people presented Broderick with their Distinguished Scholarship Award. This is very cool. I don’t know which piece of scholarship specifically they were thinking of when they decided to give the award to Damien. It might have been for The Architecture of Babel, Discourses of Literature and Science, Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction, or even for his recent fascinating book x, y, z, t: Dimensions Of Science Fiction (which, as an aside deserves a Hugo nomination in my opinion) – I don’t know. I do know it’s well deserved. Australia, for all its well-earned reputation for turning out SF academics (think Peter Nicholls, Russell Blackford, Janeen Webb and so on), has not turned out any more distinguished academics than Broderick. Who knows, if he had a blog he might even get a William Atheling nomination. It could happen.