Author websites: Boon or bane?

One of the things authors are called on to do more and more these days is create a web presence. Some are better than others, especially if they’re done by the publisher (but those are usually for high profile writers), but they all serve the common purpose of introducing their work to the public.

I created a free WIX site for 501 Baseball Books and I will be the first to admit that it’s not very good. For what I wanted to do, this particular host was the wrong way to go, given my limited technical skills. Because it’s a website, it reads differently than a blog and was much more unwieldy to manage since I had to cut and paste to move elements every time I made an addition. To incorporate a blogging feature, I had to use Blogger, which meant finding a way to piggyback onto this blog, etc.,etc.

Like I said, if it was under the aegis of the publisher, or if I had someone taking care of this for me, it wouldn’t be such an issue. But I also host Kaplan’s Korner as well as working my day job and the occasional book; the thought of adding another website or blog for my latest is already making my head spin.

When composing the entry on new titles, I came across a few author sites, among them:

Jeff Katz, Mayor of Cooperstown and author of Split Season — 1981: Fernandomania, The Bronx Zoo and The Strike That Saved Baseball
Doug Wedge, co-author of Charlie O’Brien’s The Cy Young Catcher, about which I’ve written before.
The Joy of Ballpark Food by Bennett Jacobstein is a very simple yet sincere site. It offers a table of contents, a few sample chapters, and lets the visitor know that “100% of royalties from the sales of this book are donated directly to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties.”
Another simple but perfectly fine site is Mort Zachter’s presence for Gil Hodges: A Hall of Fame Life. The venue also includes his previous book, Dough: A Memoir.
Then there’s Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty. I hope this was done by someone else, since it refers to the author in the third person and to the book as “Finally—a fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps the most controversial player in baseball history….” Really? “Finally?” As in every Cobb bio that came before was unfascinating and poorly researched? Leerhsen has previously written about horse racing and motor sports, and those volumes are included on this site.