Suse,
I can't answer for Richard, but I was a contracted web designer for many years while being employed as a data programmer for years prior to my forced and chosen stint of unemployment for almost 5 years, and although it is now defunct for many years, I had one of the first Internet Resource Centres on the internet, which was ranked number one across all search engines.
-I just realised that makes me sound very old and may be misleading. For almost 5 years I have done no paid work - not quite true because I had my own business for a couple and am currently kind of being paid, but for the 16 years prior to than and a few years after, I was contracted to build websites and was a programmer. I had an interest with the Internet when most other users were education facilities, and email was still the main mode of communication, and graphics on the Web were very painful, and marketing via the web a relatively new concept, despite there already being a million marketers out there.
I had a dream if only I could make money from the Web, I would have the time to write, I finally made money from the interent while working full time but never wrote much, then went BUST. LOLOLOLOLLOL It was lucky I moved location prior and now I live in a dream location and live that writing life, but without the money I thought I needed. Nothing venture - nothing gained, although now I live my dream that the Interent kept interferring with.
The most simpless thing, you think will take a few moments, can in fact, take all day, which can be maddening, and part of the reason this happens is technology keeps changing, and you constantly need to stay abreast and keep up to date with it.
That said I personally have not updated my own personal two sites for more than six months, unless I have had to do something, due other commitments and the maintence it takes to just keep them running and writing. They take up substancial time, especially if you gain a following. I have two and both are database driven sites, so they require a fraction more upkeep, than say a html web site. My blog I spend little time on, but to make them really work you need to spend a great deal of time on them.
I initally started my site at the same time of starting to write Australian Flavour and it over the past two years has grown in members despite not spending as much time as I should on the site. I have more than 300 members to the main site, and more than 500 overall between the forums and whatever, not an enormous amount, and frankly I am not sure what some of them do there, especially the past 6 months, but netherless it has grown. That said, without the site, the book would not be in printed format, and much of the information in the book had to be taken down from the site. Without the site I might not have my book, but it is not fiction, and on top of that no other writer, had presented what I did in the manner or way that I did ...
think carefully before building websites with your book topic as the focus and you presented as a book author prior to that being a reality. If we write, we are authors of the text we write, and if you are going to build a website an author it, make sure you don't mix the communities expecatations of what they think authors are....in other words feel free to claim authorship of your website or blog, but don't attempt to claim your unpublished writings are from a published author...which is something slighly different. Use the term
author as your readers are expecting you to use it, if that makes sense.
One thing to remember too guys is that, although Richard isn't doing it, I am have the understanding that publilshers consider data on the internet to be published, regardless if it is by a mainstream publisher. So I wouldn't suggest we go out and put our chapters on our blogs or websites.
That said, there was a woman years ago, who wrote an erotic tale and distributed each chapter free, called then, Addicted to Sex, those chapters went on to be downloaded by more than ten million people and it was published and became a best seller in that genre although the published version does not read exactly the same as the original story. But that is rare.
A website or blog does not promote a book, you need to promote that website or blog as much as the book.
Just a few thoughts.
