Getting Your Own Author Domain
AKA WWW.YOU.COM
While there are lots of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, having a place online that you can call your own is important. When you have a “domain”, you have complete control over what goes on in that corner of the Internet.
best butler everA domain name, sometimes referred to as a URL, is a unique identifier such as writershelves.com. The uniqueness extends to the suffix, be it .com or .net or .org or .biz or .mobi or .us or a lot of other possibilities. There are some restricted suffixes, like .gov and .edu, but the others can be yours … if you want to pay for them.
The important thing to understand about “owning” a domain is that you are really “leasing” it. You have to pay every year to keep control of that domain name. If you want yourname.com and yourname.org, you are going to pay two registration fees each year, one for each domain. The year you do not renew your domain is the year you no longer have access to it. This means someone else can buy it and put up whatever webpages they want and it’s too bad if people end up there looking for you because you won’t be there.
Different companies have different costs to register and renew a domain. You can often get a price break if you pay for more than one year in advance. I personally prefer DreamHost* so I can have my domain registration and hosting at the same place. Hosting is a completely different cost, but I’ll talk about that in another post.
So what should your domain name be .. your name? A nickname? The name of your novel? The name of the series? All of those are definitely possibilities. Your author domain could be a portal to all you write. Or it could be dedicated to a series or even a single novel. There is no “right” way to do an author website. If it helps people find you and sells more books, it’s doing just fine.
* this is an affiliate link. If you click through and purchase something DreamHost sells, I’ll get a bit of cash. If you think you want a domain/hosting/website in the next few months, I’ll have a new website** up in July to help you out.
** this is a plug for my up-coming website called Author Dim Sum which will have more info specifically to help authors make the most of their online presence, including an ebook for sale called “Author’s First Website” – I think. Open to suggestions on the title.
Rick Castle: You subscribed to my website? Wait a minute… are you Castlefreak1212? Castlelover45?
- Castle, “Little Girl Lost”, 1.9
May 6, 2010
Categories: authors
Leave a Reply