Every aspiring author should have a professional website.

If you're an aspiring author and are wondering about websites and promotion, check out the dearauthor.com article "What Every Author's Website Should Contain." On the sidebar, you'll see numerous comments by published authors, including Nora Roberts.

Once I had completed my first romantic short story and was halfway through my novel, I began considering the issue of the website. Should I have a website? Should I hire a designer? Who would be the potential audience for the site? I think it's important to consider these types of questions before making the investment of time and money because as I've found, a lot more goes into building and maintaining a website than I had anticipated. At first, I did contemplate hiring a web design finally decided to hold off until I have a book under contract. So, in the end, it took about a week of training with much trial and error to get my site up and running.

I recently revised my website, and I've found the best way to make my website as professional and attractive as possible is to gather ideas by visiting as many author websites as possible (read: hundreds). Since I already knew who else was writing in my genre, it was easy to visit the RWA and the Beau Monde websites to find links. One tip that I've found especially useful is to join webrings that share similar interests. Once I started browsing through websites, I discovered several webrings in my genre and promptly applied for membership.