My new website markbailey.love is now online. It's a wix site, which involves no code but tons of mouse clicking. The template I used was designed to be used for student projects. After some major modifications, it turned out to be perfect for my author website. The wix software isn't my favorite. My preference is to use raw html or markdown for page content. Wix doesn't allow this, and instead does everything with standalone wysiwyg editors and complicated menu structures. Even so, wix is easy.
The hard part is of course figuring out how it should look and creating the content. I spent a few days doing this. After settling on a simple design with flat parallax graphics, I pasted a bunch of text and got everything looking nice. Now there's a landing page which will be updated with videos or other media, a main page describing my books and how to purchase them, and two pages featuring sample chapters from The Ostermann Method and The 321 Incident.
Overall, I'm happy with how the site came together. There are still several details that need to be changed. The footer needs work, a piece of text needs a link, and there should probably be buy it now links on the sample chapter pages. I'll be fixing and tweaking it for some time.
One thing my site doesn't have is a contact form. Some of my previous website contact forms were spam magnets. My thinking is that anyone who wants to contact me can use Twitter or Telegram.
It feels good to be putting my writing out there in this new way. The web address is pretty easy to remember. The site itself feels both personal and tastefully understated. And having a single place to send people to about my novels makes perfect sense.
One next step I'm considering is making a dedicated page for each title. This might be one of those things that I wait to do until someone asks for it, a moment that may never come. For now, the site works, in a minimally-sufficient sort of way. And the impending addition of an exciting new video will totally jazz it up.
Realistically, I maybe should've made this site a few years ago, after finishing Rainbow Lullaby. But for a long time I was too deep into producing the work to even think about showcasing it. That may be changing with the completion of novel number ten. I'm still figuring out how I actually want to talk about these books.
Through this whole process, one thing that's come to the surface is the importance of the messaging behind my stories. Normally, when someone asks me what a book is about, I describe the story, not the societal issues the story highlights. Maybe it would be better if I mentioned the issues more. Still foreground the story but mention the issues it touches on.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
