Daniel Hatadi has done something very cool. Which is to be expected, since Daniel is the Australian embodiment of cool.
Before I explain, let me say I can’t stress enough the importance of authors having a website, or a webpresence. For crying out loud, it’s free to set up a blog, and you don’t have to run it like a blog. You can run it like a website, with pages for bio, books, other works and then use the “blog” feature for news updates. It’s a pet peeve of mine when authors don’t have some web presence – when I’m doing background for interviews for Spinetingler if I can’t find information about the authors online it makes it nearly impossible. Plus, when you’re moderating a panel at a convention and there’s no author information, how do you introduce them?
Anyway, yesterday I had another experience that reminded me of just how important a web presence is, when someone contacted me and asked if I knew a certain author. The author in question has no web presence whatsoever… And the reason for wanting to make contact was a good one: A conference committee was considering asking this author to teach a workshop. The problem? Nobody in the local writing community knew him and there was no obvious way to contact the guy.
Now, you can get a blog for free. You can also get on MySpace for free. I’ve had a dismissive attitude toward MySpace. Seemed to me like a central hub for pedophiles and teenagers, and I find most of the MySpace pages I’ve ever looked at incredibly frustrating. I know ‘everybody’s doing it’ but I just couldn’t be bothered.
Which is, quite possibly, why I didn’t know about the Ning thing and the central hub system…
But Daniel Hatadi did and he has set up Crimespace, a central hub for authors and fans of crime fiction, a virtual bar. Such a thing hasn’t existed online since the Mystery Circus was shut down.
I always thought something like this was a good idea, and Anne Frasier and I had been discussing doing something like this for a while. Now we don’t need to. Daniel’s gone and done it already.
I hope people will check it out and give it a chance. If I can figure out how to feed my own blog to the mypage blog I have there now, I’ll be all set.
In Other News
This is just a matter of clarification. As I am no longer in Killer Year I am officially stating, for the record, that I will not be participating in their anthology.
And I’m still working on updating and fixing my links. I’m making a list…
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6 comments:
Just signed up for Crimespace. Thanks, Sandra.
Jersey Jack
I'm stoked about Crimespace. Thanks for the heads-up!
I read an article about Ning the other day and within about five minutes I grabbed the crimespace moniker before anyone else thought of it. Spent the next few days getting familiar with the tools, trying to make it a little pretty (if only it was possible to read black text on a black background), then I sat on it.
Then I thought, well, it's free. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter. At the very least it'll be a great place for readers to stumble on who are looking for new and cool authors.
At the most, it really will turn into a massive and popular bar for crime fiction lovers.
Thanks for the plug, Sandra.
If you got a list, I wanna be on it.
Oh wait, I am.
*dodges bullet*
whoo.
And yeah, thanks, Daniel. One more blog I can obsess over never updating. Thank you sooooo much.
authors not having web sites also bother the reader...there are a large number of authors whose only familiarity with a computer extends to the programs they write with, so they are hardly likely to have any sort of web presence...sad but true
You can always be counted on to have the most interesting links. If writers were a crime family- you would be very connected.
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