Are you ready to pick a WordPress theme for your new website and blog? If you’ve been following our Saturday social media for authors blog series and completed the first six “baby steps”, you already have a domain name, webhost, and content management system ready to go. Hopefully you’ve found time over the holidays to do a bit of window shopping and figured out how you want your new site to look. For baby step seven, you want to keep that general aesthetic in mind. If you haven’t yet completed all the previous steps, don’t fret. Even if you haven’t installed WordPress.org through the control panel at your webhost, you can still look around and see what you want for YOUR site in 2012. Go to WordPress.org, search through their free themes, and take a demo before you decide. Here are the 5 themes we recommend for a professional author’s website and blog: 1. Delicate. This theme is simple, clean, and customizable. It’s a good alternative to Atahualpa, which is a very basic theme for authors who don’t want to spend much time on widgets and other flashy web gadgets. Delicate is a beautiful way to start. 2. Coraline. Popular, elegant, and easily managed. It is a hybrid between the Magazine Theme and the basic Twenty Eleven (either of these would also work for an author, too). 3. Matisse. This theme is a bit more fun and colorful, but with core customization options every author needs like a custom header, custom menus, theme…

Yesterday was a rough day for those whose online presence is the lifeblood of their business. Authors, included. Early on Friday, August 2nd, a datacenter in Provo, Utah, experienced an outage. Millions of sites came crashing down. Including this one. Perhaps yours, too. Endurance International Group, the parent company of the largest webhosting firms BlueHost, GatorHost, HostMonsters, JustHost, and 50 others, experienced a cascading crash of its servers stranding small businesses for the day. In a statement from COO Ron LaSalvia, the incident is still under full review and they have already put into place processes to prevent this from happening again.  “I sincerely apologize for any outages and negative impact you may have experienced… We are committed to providing you with the high-quality, reliable service that you’ve come to expect and deserve. We value our relationship and the role we play in helping your business succeed.” COO Ron LaSilvia posted his weak apology and empty promise on a quickly assembled centralized site for all of their brand to provide an ongoing stream of information about this incident. The site proved necessary when even the webhosting corporate sites went down. Meanwhile, in yesterday’s morning business news, EIG announced its partnership with Google to make the matter of making a small business website as simple and fast as having a cup of coffee. EIG acquired WordPress Designs, a software company that sells website developer tools based on the WordPress platform, and Magento, an ecommerce platform. WordPress is widely used by small…

Are you on the start of your journey to publication? Authors’ names are their brands, and satisfied readers exercise brand loyalty. They shop for titles by author name, and when they come across a real find, they recommend it to friends. Those friends do the same, and the chain continues. But a book is more than a cover or jacket. It is the embodiment of a human voice to which the reader seeks connection. Thus, loyal readers attend book signings, subscribe to newsletters, and use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms to make contact with favorite authors. The deeper the social connection between reader and author, the more likely the reader will act as the author’s sales agent. There is nothing better than word-of-mouth advertising for a book. Cultivating an audience for your writing is something you are expected to bring to the table when you have a manuscript for them to consider for publication. In creating your author platform and establishing your name as your brand, you want to be consistent and constant. If your name is Amy Anderson, your professional contact email will be amy@amyanderson.com; your gmail will be amyanderson@gmail.com; your website will be www.amyanderson.com. Your Twitter account will be – drumroll please – @AmyAnderson. Do not use the title of your book. Do not use any catchy taglines or slogans. Use your name. But first check that your name is available. Since Amy Anderson is a common name, you may need to use a legal…