Want to curl up with a good Web page on a cold winter night? Here’s how we rate a few sites:
www.tomwolfe.com
(star) (star) (star)
As elegantly streamlined as the author himself.
www.patriciacornwell.com
(star) (star)
Wildly egotistical . . . Ever wondered about her favorite food?
www.net-site.com/straub
(star) (star) (star) (star)
Creative . . . Original . . . Spectacular.
www.scottturow.com
B-O-R-I-N-G.
(1/2 star)
ETHER, ETHER!
JUST GROWING A BEARD AND WEARING A BUSH JACKET IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE; TODAY AUTHORS MUST BE WEBMASTERS
It was a dark and stormy site.
As the number of authors who have Internet home pages piles up like metaphors in a New Yorker short story, the Web sites generally fall into one of three categories: They’re either ludicrously melodramatic and self-aggrandizing; bland and boring; or so fetchingly creative that they rival the authors’ “real” work on the printed page.
Some authors apparently dismiss their sites as just another publicity tool, like the biographical braggadocio on the backs of book jackets (“She was born in a small town in West Virginia and through talent and pluck managed to fight her way to the top of the literary heap . . . “). Others regard them as a way to build a community of readers (known in other businesses as “customers”). Some authors are actively involved in creating and constantly updating their sites; others hire Web designers or rely on their publishers to maintain sites.
The variety of approaches means that, like virtually everything else connected with the Internet, nobody quite knows what author sites eventually will turn out to be: fancy billboards; virtual gathering places for fans; or something else altogether, something as yet barely visible in the distance, rising from its slumber and slouching Netward.
Might all author sites become, as a few are now, simply points of sale for e-books? Will there come a time when readers who want, say, the latest Julie Garwood novel simply log on to www.juliegarwood.com, click on a dollar-sign icon and, seconds later, download her latest tale?
“It’s a whole new world,” said Kate Tentler, vice president of Simon & Schuster’s online publishing division. “Everything is being redefined.”
No matter what the future of author sites turns out to be, however, this much is clear: It’s not enough anymore for writers simply to write books. They need a presence on the Web.
And if it makes a squeamish, publicity-shy author feel like a snake-oil salesman traveling the countryside in a big wagon with his name plastered on the side — well, he can blush all the way to the bank.
“All authors want a Web site now,” said Greg Durham, director of online publishing for Random House. “I got more requests from authors in 2000 than ever before. It’s really ramped up.”
Publishing houses, of course, hope their role won’t be eliminated. That’s why they work with authors to set up sites and explore other ways to link the Internet with the traditional publishing process.
Like books themselves, author sites vary wildly in quality and comprehensiveness. Stephen King, who has published his own e-books and is obviously energized by the potential of the Internet, keeps his site (www.stephenking.com) percolating with fresh material. It includes links to categories such as “the rumors,” “the answers,” “the man,” “the past,” “the future” and “the now.” On anybody else’s site, that might look like silly chest-thumping; but from King, it’s somehow quirky and charming. The author also includes articles written about his work and his responses.
At the other end of the creativity spectrum are sites such as Scott Turow’s (www.scottturow.com). The Chicago author, famous for his best-selling legal thrillers, offers the equivalent of a flier stuck under your windshield wiper when you’re parked at the mall: It’s visually dull, with a few tepid links to a Turow biography and a list of his appearances. The main art is a picture of a book jacket.
And then there are what might be called the megalomania sites, the ones that sound as if they were written by the author’s proud mother: They feature fawning life stories; self-indulgent Q-and-A’s that plumb the tedious depths of the author’s adventures and copious references to those wonderful books. Queen of this genre of author site must be mystery writer Patricia Cornwell, whose site (www.patriciacornwell.com) is a study in virtual swaggering. Dean Koontz (www.deankoontz.com) and Barbara Delinsky (www.barbaradelinsky.com), however, aren’t far behind.
A Chicago company is betting that author Web sites are the key to the future of publishing. Susan Bergman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Previewport.com, said the sites help create “a dynamic literary community on the Internet.”
Launched last June, Previewport.com builds and hosts sites for authors, and compiles a national literary calendar and international directory of writers. More than 100 authors have already signed with the company to create and maintain their sites (for a $49.95 monthly fee), including Michael Ondaatje, Sara Paretsky, Tim O’Brien, Rita Dove, Steve Martin, Amy Bloom, Rosellen Brown, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Gordon, Robert Bly and Jonathan Kozol.
The power of an author site is tremendous, Bergman said. She cited the poet Billy Collins, who had sold a few hundred copies of a book of poetry published by a small press. Then he created a site, compiled an e-mail list of visitors and began sending them a poem each month. When his next book was published, it sold 24,000 copies and he was offered a three-book deal from a major publisher, she reported.
“The Internet is an audience-builder for authors,” Bergman said.
Her company isn’t stopping there, however. Previewport.com also publishes original work by its authors that customers can purchase and download into their computers or into wireless handheld devices such as Palm Pilots.
Publishing “is being reinvented for the electronic age,” Bergman said. “We’re a bridge between traditional publishing and Internet publishing.”
It isn’t just young, hip authors who know the value of the Web. Veteran authors such as Sidney Sheldon (www.sidneysheldon.com) and Mary Higgins Clark (www.maryhigginsclark.com) maintain friendly, serviceable sites that are as comfortable as a pair of old slippers.
Indeed, as Tentler pointed out, it was romance writers — who would hardly be considered the most cutting-edge of scribes — who pioneered the concept of building relationships with readers, a communion that would go beyond the one-shot deals beginning and ending with a single book purchase. First with newsletters they mailed to fans, and then with Internet Web sites featuring bulletin boards and chat rooms, romance writers got the ball rolling.
“It’s all about fans, about passion,” Tentler said.
Yet some authors, she cautioned, don’t know what they’re getting into. “Many misunderstand the amount of work and effort these things require. Not all authors have the makeup for this. Authors are writers. Sometimes they like having communication with readers; sometimes they don’t.”
If an author sets up a flat, featureless site and then just drifts away — are you listening, Scott Turow? — chances are that visitors to the site will drift away, too, and never return.
But if an author takes an active interest in the site by answering reader e-mails and changing material often, the results can be not only lucrative, but fun.
Take it from Peter Straub, the best-selling author of “Ghost Story” and other books, whose site (www.net-site.com/straub) is a blast. Straub created a fictional character — an insufferable academic named Putney — who critiques Straub’s work, taking high-minded potshots at the popular novels.
“I just thought it would be funny to have Putney write something scathing and dismissive about each of my books. Every time I bring out a book, I have a good time writing Putney’s comments, which are less and less about me and more and more about himself.
“I like sites that unfold, where you walk into one room and then another. I like sites that don’t give up their secrets all at once,” said Straub, who is in the midst of his second collaboration with King, a follow-up to their enormously successful novel “The Talisman” that is titled “Black House.”
Some authors resist setting up sites, he acknowledged, either because they don’t cotton to the Internet or just don’t want to take the time. Straub has debated author Harlan Ellison, a well-known opponent of Internet technology despite his sci-fi credentials, on the virtues of the cyberworld. Straub’s friend Donald Westlake, a mystery writer, also has no interest in establishing a site, he said.
But if writers become famous enough, fans set up sites on their behalf, whatever the author’s preference, Straub pointed out. And even when writers have authorized sites, people are free to set up any unauthorized sites they wish.
“That’s the whole ethos of the Internet. There’s no censorship. It’s wild. It’s like the frontier,” he declared. “It’s not only a whole new world — it’s a million different worlds. It’s so ripe.”
Except for direct sales through publishers and online booksellers that are offered on some sites, and which still represent only a minuscule fraction of total book sales, the financial payoff of authors’ sites is impossible to determine precisely. “But that’s not what it’s about,” Straub said. “My purpose was to be amusing, to give people a laugh and to inform them about what books I’ve done.”
Books that visitors to the site may one day want to purchase — if, that is, they can tear themselves away from Straub’s free online efforts, which are exhilaratingly inventive.
Witness this summary of Straub’s early life, which introduces the site’s biography section: “When kindergarten turned out to be a stupefyingly banal disappointment devoted to cutting animal shapes out of heavy colored paper, he took matters into his own hands and taught himself to read by memorizing his comic books. . . . Therefore, when he finally got to 1st grade to find everyone else laboring over the imbecile adventures of Dick, Jane and Spot (“See Spot run. See, see, see,”) he ransacked the library in search of pirates, soldiers, detectives, spies, criminals and other colorful souls.”
