Monday, March 3, 2014

The Chained Site: Behind the Scenes of the Story

I was reading the first post of Darcy Pattison's month-long series on author websites, and when she mentioned that one thing readers like is access to exclusive content I thought, "Hey I have that. I should put it someplace people can actually find it."

I'd added a subdomain for Chained a long time ago so I
could add more content about the book without overwhelming my author site. (If you have a website already, it doesn't cost anything to add a subdomain, and it works like another website). I hadn't made it public yet because I wanted to work on it more, but I was reminded of it whenever I spoke to a class about revisions, because I'd been meaning to add a deleted scenes page for all the cool stuff that had to be cut from the final book.

When I took a gander at it again I realized it was closer to presentable than I thought. I opened an older draft of Chained, copied some deleted scenes, and pasted them to a new page on the subdomain site. In addition to the deleted scenes page, there's more in-depth information about the setting and why I chose it, a page for the foreign editions and covers, and the activities and curriculum guide that are on the author site too.

So, hop on over to The Chained Site if you'd like to check it out. It'll be a work-in-progress that I'll add to now and then when I think of more things readers might like to see on there. I'm hoping it'll be a good resource for classrooms and a fun place for readers to get some behind-the-scenes information.

I'd love to hear what else would be good to include on the site, if you have some ideas!

3 comments:

  1. I am curious as to how an author-site becomes two sites at no additional cost... Yours look distinct and very nice, Lynne.

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    1. Thanks, Mirka! I called my web host and told them what I wanted to do, and they told me how to set up the subdomain, so it's a site connected to my author site.

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  2. Interesting idea. I like the new site and I really like this one, too--your colors and header picture are beautiful.

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