A Website for Nothing at All
the dilemma of an author-in-progress
Photo via Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash
When my friend told me I should make a website to house all of the essays I’d been posting on Medium my first thought was uuuuuhhhhhhg. Medium’s so easy. You write something and people like your mom can read it without having a Medium subscription if you send a friend link. Also, Medium pays its writers in accordance with the amount of time paid subscribers spend reading their work. I get big fat checks—often to the tune of one or two, never more than two, dollars—deposited directly, I think, into my PayPal account.
When combined with my Rakuten (formerly EBates) earnings, I’ve made enough money via Medium to cover approximately one-quarter of the hand-poured soy candle I ordered from Ignite Your Peace on Etsy last week. What kind of an ungrateful, privileged person would I be to give up something like that?
Apparently the kind of person who seeks outside validation and whose ownership of her identity as a writer is guided primarily by fear because, after a little bit of soul-searching, I discovered these were the root causes of my reluctance to make my own website.
Validation
Medium employs this mysterious process called curation wherein the site’s secret team of faceless nameless (as far as I know) editors review your published stories and “selects those that meet a high editorial standard.” When your story is curated, the basic result is Medium shows it in more places which means your story reaches more readers.
For a lot of writers, curation is the goal because more readers = more money. But, honestly, I never cared about the money. My goal was always to get better at writing stuff people want to read. For me, curation was an indication that what I was writing was fit for human consumption. When my story was curated, I won.
I started to read more and more (Medium) articles about the mystery of curation and how to “make it” on Medium. A lot of the Medium writers I follow share strategies and tips for becoming better content writers or bloggers, neither of which are my long-term goals. What I want to do is write a novel. Maybe multiple novels if I survive long enough to finish the one I’m working on now. So why was I spending time fooling around writing essays on Medium and using more and more of my valuable, limited time trying to get better at doing so?
Well, that would be the fear.
Fear
I don’t know why the hell making a website for my “writerly” self felt so scary. I have to guess it’s partially because there’s no standard measure for deciding when I’ve earned my right to such a title. Was my old home decor blog, Embrace My Space, just the beginning or was that what made me a writer? What about the poem I wrote my junior year of high school, a droning metaphor for writer’s block complete with chains and the other absurd restraints my naïve pre-Fifty Shades mind imagined, that was printed somewhere?
Maybe it was that time I had my boring article about the “strings-attached” provisions of the Internal Revenue Code published in the law review? What about, for goodness sakes, the essay I wrote that was published in an actual book of essays by an actual publisher that I actually held in my hands as I stood on stage and read from in a cool ass bar in New York freaking City?
I dunno. I have no answer to this question. All I know is that I want to be a writer who writes a book and a website for such a person would feature, ahem, a book. I also knew Medium was a safe hiding place for such a person.
What’s the Author-In-Progress to Do?
Need for validation and big scary FEAR aside, I started to research the details of making my own site. I found a bunch of great articles by publishing industry experts emphasizing the benefits of having a website before you have an agent or a book and the simplicity of doing so. This article by book marketing expert Jane Freidman was particularly helpful in explaining the basics of why I should have a website before I have a book to sell and what my website should include:
Unpublished Writers and Websites: Should You Have One and What Should It Say?
Eric Smith, literary agent and YA writer/enthusiast, wrote this article (with helpful examples) about how to create a simple yet-to-be-published author’s website. Both articles emphasized the fact that simplicity is key. All your website really needs is an appropriate domain name, a bio/about page and a contact page.
No big deal, right?
Here Comes the Imposter
Did you sing that to the tune of the 1995 Ini Komoze hit Here Comes the Hotstepper? If not, do it now.
It’s pretty fun. Maybe we should all start singing that any time we feel our imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head. It’s pretty hard to pay attention to your inner critic while also singing na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
Anyway. In his article, Eric Smith acknowledged that the creation of a website could trigger a writer’s imposter syndrome. He said, “look, one thing that hangs up a lot of writers when trying to launch a personal website pre-book and pre-agent, is the idea that they don’t have anything to talk about yet.” He follows up by saying that doesn’t matter. Your personal website doesn’t have to be active if you don’t want to blog. All your website really needs to do is, according to Eric, exist AND showcase who you are.
duh.
But Who AM I?
What’s the quote again about writing that starts with how it’s so easy and ends with the writer bleeding all over the page?
That’s how I felt when considering how to create a website that showcases who I am as a writer. For me, coming up with things to say isn’t that much of a problem. On the other hand, figuring out how to digitally package all the things I have written and might write in the future felt pretty overwhelming. I looked around my office for clues. All I saw were stacks of craft books, novels and science books and dozens of neon Post It notes with my Sharpie scribbled all over them.
So instead I went looking for inspiration from people who actually have their -ish together. You know, those people with new releases and backlists and awesome reviews and Netflix series and major motion pictures based on their novels. People like Jenny Han, David & Nicola Yoon, Kevin Wilson and Rainbow Rowell. God, I even went to John Green’s website.
As I’m writing this I feel like I have an even ittier-bittier version of the real life Sebastian Maniscalco standing on my shoulder saying with his unbelievable comedic delivery, “WHYYYY-would-you-do-that?”
I dunno. I guess I didn’t know what else to do.
One thing I did know was that these authors’ websites have one of two things on the homepages: their beautiful, famous face or their beautiful, famous book covers. When it came to finding inspiration for my own website, I found this problematic for two reasons:
I don’t have a book
My face don’t mean nothing to nobody
For about a week, my perfectionism and imposter syndrome engaged in a knock-down-drag-out fight in whatever part of my brain such things take place. After some deep breathing and therapy FaceTime sessions with no fewer than three of my friends and talking to Dan, the amazingly patient owner of Author Pop who built this website for me, I made a decision. Rather than continue to fear the fact that, no matter what, my website would be imperfect to me because I don’t have a book yet, I decided to exploit the fear instead.
Making it Imperfect
I sat with these questions for a few days: Who am I as a writer? A human? What are the things I like to talk about? What do those things say about me? Apart from the books and great headshots, what else did I like about the author websites that caught my eye?
What came up for me repeatedly was the idea of being a work in progress, not only as an author, but as a mother, a friend, a wife, a woman. This whole process of writing and being human is really messy and I’m SO not okay with that. It’s what I’m working on, and, more importantly, it’s what I love to write about.
The other thing I came up with was squares.
Maybe it’s because straight lines and angles are the opposite of imperfect, but psychoanalysis aside, that’s what my eye was drawn to when I returned to study the designs of the author websites I really liked. Everything was simple, blocky and bright.
What else is simple and blocky and bright? Obviously, the dozens and dozens of Post Its stuck over every surface of my office.
And so, through a lot of back and forth with Dan AND, in a fun twist, a talented artist I’ve known since I was a teenager, my homepage was born.
Surprisingly, it includes a big ol’ stack of books AND my smug mug. Two things I never thought I could pull off at this stage of the game. It’s blocky, bright and, appropriate for what I am right now and what I always will be: an imperfect work in progress.