Welcome to my site by Sheena Wilkinson

I’m proud. But I’m also embarrassed.   

Proud of my lovely new website, launched a few weeks ago, and the result of lots of hard work from both me and Emma Pass, who as well as being a RNA-shortlisted author, and generally fabulous person, also happens to be a wonderful web designer. Qualities for this last, as well as being able to do Hard Computery Things, include being calm and methodical in the face of Panicking Author. The Panicking Author was, of course, me.

 

So why am I embarrassed? Well, it’s 2023. I’ve been published since 2010 – in fact, if you count short stories and a book of literary criticism, since 2007. And though I have described www.sheenawilkinson.com  as my ‘new’ website, I suppose I mean simply ‘my website’. In other words, yes, it really has taken me this long to get one.

 

I can’t explain why. I’m not a complete technophobe: I manage to blog on here regularly and I promise I am not that Zoom participant who can’t make her camera work. I make good presentations about my books to show at events. I bought the domain name back in about 2011, thinking vaguely that I would get round to building a site one day. Soon. Sometime. People told me it was easy. Every year I put ‘make a website’ at the top of my New Year’s Resolutions. Every year I failed. It became, I suppose, a kind of mental block. I would feel frustrated at festivals or school visits when I was introduced with an out of date or inaccurate biography, instead of the one I had sent, but of course that was largely my own fault: if I’d had a website I would have had more control.

 

Then last year I got my first deal for an adult novel. Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau comes out on 2 March from HarperCollins Ireland. And it would be mortifying not to have a website. My teen readers mightn’t have bothered much, but I knew adults would expect to be able to go to a one-stop shop to find out more about me, especially as they would probably not have heard of me. This is a major development in my career, and I needed a website to reflect that. 

 

The book was due to be announced in January, which gave me a deadline – we all need those. I booked Emma, started writing copy, and gradually, with me supplying the words and Emma doing all the techy/designy things, we went live about ten days ago.

 

It makes me feel so grown up. (I’m 54.) It makes me feel so like a real writer. (I’m just about to publish my ninth novel/tenth book.) I love having the link to it as my email signature. It's great being able to say to people who approach me about school visits, etc. The information is all on my website. 

 

Yesterday I had my first approach through the contact form, apart from a couple from friends to test it was working. And yes, it made me feel like a real person with a website. 

 Sad, maybe, to have been so backward. And of course I’m such a late developer that probably websites are very last decade. But I don’t care. And I’m posting about it to say that if anyone else out there has been reluctant to set up their website, please don’t be. It’s such a lovely feeling to have something online that’s completely your own.

And do feel free to stop by! 

 

 

Thoughts on author websites before I take the plunge – by Rowena House

Researching WW1 for The Goose Road led me to many fantastic websites, among my favourites of which was author Lydia Syson’s, with its incredible wealth of links related to her insightful & powerful tale of the 1871 Paris Commune, Liberty’s Fire.

There’s so much knowledge there – from eye-witness accounts of the blood spilt to tantalizing ideas about the connection between the Commune and werewolves & zombie movies – that finding it almost brought my own story to a halt as I became drawn deeper and deeper into these extraordinary events.

Lydia’s site (www.lydiasyson.com) also set an extremely high benchmark for the depth of research and breadth of resources that can be found on the very best children’s author websites. I can’t hope to match her scholarship, but I can admire it from afar.

The more I’ve looked at author websites for inspiration for my own new site – searches which tend to be biased towards young people’s historical fiction, given my subject – the clearer it has become just how generous many authors are with their knowledge.

There are reading lists, lesson plans and activity packs, photograph galleries and collections of historical maps, museums to visit and games to play, and, and, and...

I know it’s unfair to single out anyone in a crowded field of excellence, but I particularly love Ally Sherrick’s classroom resources linked to her Black Powder story about the gunpowder plot (https://allysherrick.com/resources-2/).

Sadly, the smorgasbord that is Michael Morpurgo’s website overwhelmed rural Devon’s lethargic broadband, which at the time of writing, post-Storm Aileen, has all-but ground to a halt. I had time to make tea before his home page finished loading, and the download of one (of fifteen) teaching packs listed among his resources seized up my connection at 27%.

This experience of waiting raised an important issue for me: when designing my own site, should I assume that readers/schools/librarians/bookshops will have sufficient broadband capacity to support the latest apps and videos etc. or should I “Keep It Simple, Stupid” which always seems like good advice in almost every situation.

Some of the great writers have Kept It Simple. Margaret Atwood’s home page appears almost plain, but is subtly sophisticated with tumbling cubes of her covers that load quickly even at the end of more than a mile of copper wire.

This speed was in marked contrast to some older-fashioned sites, even some created by writers I know to be tech-savvy. One, for example, became stuck for more than a minute uploading a logo and struggled with pictures embedded in her (excellent) blog.

It seems that keeping up-to-date is essential, without going over the top.

Another thing I’ve learnt on the slow journey to publication is that return-on-advertising investment is long-term at best, non-existent at worst. So I won’t splash out on a webpage design service unless and until I can afford it. In the meanwhile, since web design isn’t rocket science, I’m going to have a go at do-it-yourself.

There is, of course, a very high probability I will fall on my face quite a lot in this process, and may well end up screaming for help. I’ve already attracted the unwanted attention of web-services providers just by buying a domain name, hence spam filters are even now being upgraded. Also, I wouldn’t risk starting out without support from my husband and son.

But as with almost everything to do with this writing business, there is an enormous amount of free design advice out there from good PR firms, and trust-worthy writing consultants who are also good at PR, as well as free software (I’m going with WordPress) and endless examples of best practice.

I’m also deeply grateful that SCBWI-BI is holding another marketing boot camp for debut authors this month, run by the inestimable Candy Gourlay, Sara Grant & Mo O’Hara, an event which got rave reviews last year. I’m sure that all of us who’ve been lucky enough to get a place on this course will come away from it buzzing.

Meanwhile, if any seasoned website-hosting authors have advice to offer a newbie on pitfalls to avoid or time-saving tips that are well-worth the effort, or anyone has thoughts to share or questions on content & design, I’d love to hear from you.

Twitter @HouseRowena

Rowena House FB author page

Website Coming Soon!

PS If you’re a professional web designer, don’t get in touch. I’ll only block/ignore you. Soz.

 

 

Why use a book when you can use the web?

Last month, I talked to the school librarians of Hampshire at their annual conference in Winchester.  One of the things they had especially asked me to talk about was why children should use books for research rather than the web. As more teachers expect children to do their homework from online sources, it is harder for libraries to make the benefits of books clear. It was good to be asked that, as it's something that's central to a lot of what I do. It's a question I'd not tried to answer before for other people - I just had a vague sense that there were very good reasons. Working out what they are was a really useful exercise.

There are some obvious reasons, such as the availability of books to be read even by students who don't have broadband at home. It's easy to think everyone can be online all the time, but in 2013, only 42% of UK households had broadband, and 17% had no internet at all.

But there are better reasons to make books available to young people in school libraries, and to encourage their use.

You need to know what you want to know
It's easy to find out something (a specific fact, such as the dates of the Civil War or how to make risotto), but quite hard to find out about something. Suppose a young person wanted to find out about dinosaurs. Search for 'dinosaur' on Google and you get 78.8 million hits. Hardly anyone will look beyond the first page.

The web is not written for young people
The first hit is wikipedia (of course), 17,000 words starting, "Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 231.4 million years ago, and were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, from the beginning of the Jurassic (about 201 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous (66 million years ago), when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of most dinosaur groups at the close of the Mesozoic Era. Not child-friendly.


How about the Natural History Museum? It has good info but is not organised in a way that makes it easy for a young student to find what they want. Behind the first, child-friendly, page it goes to a database of dinosaurs that can be sorted in  different ways. The information is presented in a dry and relatively unengaging way and if you don't know what you are looking for, it's hard to find what you need.

We could go on.

But let's try something different. Search Amazon (just to look, not to buy anything!) for children's books about dinosaurs and the first hit is  National Geographic's First Book of Dinosaurs. Here's the contents page. Which would you rather look at if you were, say, 9? This or the NHM database?

The web has no gatekeepers or guidance
The information in a book is generally accurate and unbiased. If a book is about an issue of fact, the facts are on the whole correct. If it is about an issue of opinion, all sides of an argument are presented, equipping the reader to make up his or her mind in an informed way.

My book on evolution came out last year, so I looked to see what a young reader might find online about evolution.This was the fifth hit - looks quite accessble. But all is not as it seems:

“Dinosaurs could not have gone extinct millions of years ago because Earth isn’t that old!”

“Dinosaurs, reptiles that are very different from birds, did not change into birds. God specially created birds on Day Five and dinosaurs on Day Six!”

A child growing up in a Creationist environment (family/school/USA) might encounter this view, but a child in a school library should be safe from minority views being peddled as undisputed fact. That's what homes are for.

Not all facts are true (see above)
Some websites look authoritative but have an agenda (not just the Creationist agenda). If you were researching sugar, you might think sugar.org looks like a good start. It is, of course, a sort of sugar-marketing board and would give a vulnerable young reader a completely distorted view of the value of sugar in the diet. And some 'facts' are just wrong, such as this one, widely cited: “According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003.” It's true that Eric Schmidt said it, but that's all. Go back to the sources, and the real fact is that as much information was published, recorded or shared every two days in 2010 as in all of 2002. (And most of it was probably videos of kittens and pictures of people doing something stupid - not useful information.)

The web is a false form of laziness
It might look as though it's easier for a child to look online than find a book in the library. But it's laziness that backfires.
 
The web is full of accurate, fascinating information. It's also full of inaccurate, dull garbage. The web is not bad - but using it properly takes time and skill. A book written specifically for children could be based entirely on online research - but the author will have done the hard things:

• finding the right information
• checking the information
• selecting the relevant and interesting information
• presenting the information in an accessible, appropriate way for young readers.

If a young reader goes straight to Google, they have to do all this - and usually they don't, of course. They copy and paste the first thing they come across and learn nothing. Learning to use the web is a vital skill, but learning subject content should not be jeopardised by expecting children to depend on their nascent web skills.

I ended my talk with this chart. I could just have given you the chart and shut up, I suppose. This is why kids learn more from a well-chosen book than a Google search:

 

Using the web, the pupil has to do all the work - find the information, select it, find a route through it, work out what the words (usually intended for adults) mean, and decide whether the facts are correct. In a book, the author has done all that. The pupil can get on with learning about the subject. They can develop those other vital skills while researching less important content.

Anne Rooney

Evolution, TickTock (Hachette), September 2014: 9781783251346

'Book Week Coming Up' - Saviour Pirotta

It's that time of the year when teachers and and literacy co-oridinators up and down the country begin to organise their book weeks, a lot of which take place in October and early November.  For many writers, school visits provide an income stream which, along with PLR and ALCS, is becoming increasingly important in this age of heavy discounting and shrinking royalties.  I've been visiting schools for nearly thirty years now, so I thought I'd pass on some tips on how to get the most out of the experience.

We all know why the school has booked us.  They want to promote literacy and the love of books. They want the kids to get excited about reading and writing by meeting a real-life author.  But what do WE want from school visits? I find it pays to sit myself down once in a while and work out a school visit strategy for the next few months.  In fact I do this at the beginning of every term; it helps me decide which schools I accept to visit.

Do I just need the cash to keep me going till the next round of royalty payments, in which case I tend to say yes to the first schools that phone. That way I can get my p.a. diary filled and my work schedule planned as quickly as possible.  Is there a new book or series I want to promote or sell?  If the latter is the correct answer, I allocate some time to rehearsing my performance. I set about getting postcards printed, my website updated to reflect the promotion and harassing my publishers for extra free copies of the book in question. It's amazing how quickly a book starts to look tatty once it's been passed round a couple of staffrooms.

I find giving out postcards a brilliant way of promoting my website, and by extension my books.  I try to have an exciting image on the front and my website address on the back, in an easy-to-read font.  Children do not dip in out of the net like us grown up fogeys do; they inhabit it.  The first thing they do when they hear your name is 'google' you, so if you don't have a snazzy website for them to explore you're on a one-way hike to loserville as far as they're concerned.  Don't bother putting on any more info than your website address on the card.  Stick all that on the site itself, where children can check it out at their leisure.  If the site is attractive enough, visitors will keep coming back, giving you the perfect opportunity to engage with them and promote your books.  Which is a heck of a lot to get out of a little postcard!  I give mine out at the end of the day, usually sticking to one or two per class.  Resist the temptation to put details of your fb and twitter pages on the card unless you write books for KS3.  Children under 13 are not supposed to have any of these social media accounts.

Don't make the mistake of putting free stories on your site.  I did this for a while and it was alarming how many schools went from 'we bought some of your books' to 'we downloaded your stories from the net.'  Nowadays I tell the kids that if they log on to my site when they get home, they would find a free story.  But it only stays up for a day, and only appears after a visit, not before.

Some authors only visit schools if they're allowed to sell their books at the end of the day.  I don't do this, mainly because I don't drive and can only lug a few copies of my books around.  Recently, though, I signed up with Authors Aloud who organise the sale of my books with local bookshops. I do insist, however, that the children are familiar with my work before the visit.  More often than not they already have some of my books in the school library, although they are not always aware of it.  I just tell them to go have a good look round. Or I might suggest they borrow them from the local library. If you visit a lot of schools in the same area the local schools library service might even agree to buy a certain amount of your books which they send out in special 'author' boxes.

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but I consider author visits a vital part of our metiere and well worth the time invested in them.  And they're jolly good fun too!! It's like going back to school without the danger of being told off!    

Visit my site at www.spirotta.com
I do school visits through Authors Aloud. Visit their website here.