Roxyanne Young
eFrog Press is delighted to welcome Roxyanne Young as a regular contributor. Roxy is a children’s author and photographer with extensive knowlege about websites. To connect with your readers online, you may want to create a web presence. In this post, Roxy covers the basics in clear, non-techy English.

If the Internet has revolutionized the publishing industry, it’s revolutionized the marketing industry, too. Just twenty short years ago, we were all marveling over CDs and lamenting the demise of the vinyl LP. The Big Thing then was America Online. Live chat with real people all over the world. Amazing. We were fascinated by websites and e-commerce. We could shop from our living rooms via online catalogs and have packages show up at our doors. Amazon.com became the world’s bookstore, and then the world’s shopping mall.

In the last two decades, authors have been empowered by electronic publishing options, too, thanks to publishers like eFrog Press. Even traditional houses are embracing ebooks. But it’s not enough just to write a book anymore. These days you have to be your own marketing department, too. The Big Thing now: your Author Platform.

Websites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, GoodReads . . . where do you start? And really, how do you deal with the monumental time suck of building and maintaining that platform?

The easy answer: Build a website that includes a blog and integrate it with the social media outlets you use the most.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be outlining just how to do that, but let’s start with an overview.

If I have a blog, do I really need a website?

Yes, you do. A blog is an ever-growing collection of posts that changes every time you update your status with a new message. A website, though, is a collection of static pages with content that doesn’t change much at all. (more…)