Exploring and understanding audience, encouraging communication, announcing excerpts and celebrating book releases. Just basically talking about websites... and the occasional cupcake.

September Wrap-Up

by Emily Cotler
September 30, 2008 – 4:40 pm

September was a big month for our clients in terms of book releases. I will show blatant nepotism and celebrate she-with-whom-I-share-DNA first, lest I get shafted on the pumpkin pie at her house in two months. To wit:

Today, Julia Quinn releases her much anticipated follow-up to The Lost Duke of Wyndham with Mr. Cavendish, I Presume, her best to date, in my opinion. Yes, I got to read it before her editor got to read it. Eat your heart out. Julia and Wax rang in the new release with a refreshed home page layout. Tell us what you think!

Julia isn’t the only hot author with a book out today. Laura Lee Guhrke continues her popular Girl-Bachelor series with Secret Desires of a Gentleman. Coinciding with the book hitting stores, Laura and Wax updated her beautiful website by enhancing the existing visual. Same design, only better.

And one more today: Regency-era expert and all-around superstar Candice Hern co-stars with superstars Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, and Jacquie D’Alessandro in the anthology It Happened One Night.

Also new in September, Michael Spradlin released The Youngest Templar, a book I devoured in one evening about seven months ago. The fact that it sold to over a half a dozen countries before it was released anywhere should assure anyone of its excellence. Head over to Mike’s site to see the book’s gorgeous end papers. Really lovely. And Mike wasn’t the only YA book we helped usher in this month. One of our two new site launches this month was for Antony John, whose debut book, Busted, had me rolling. In a market where there just isn’t enough YA out there for boys, these two books shine. (I want to point out that I am a girl, and I loved both these books. These are not just for boys.)

Diane Gaston’s Regency-set paparazzi tale Scandalizing the Ton hit in both the UK and North America around Sept 24. Diane is promoting the book with a new kind of book trailer. Instead of doing what everyone else is doing, we came up with something new: the author introducing the book in her own words. Check it out.

Joy Nash’s Immortals: The Crossing also snuck into bookstores early this week. This is a continuation of the wildly successful series. Joy has a page on her site dedicated to The World of Immortals. Paranormal fans everywhere are clapping.

Jennie Lucas released Italian Prince, Wedlocked Wife in the UK (coming in January 2009 to North America) and we want everyone to know it — Wax just added sharing to her site to help spread the word.

Children’s author Karma Wilson introduced her faithful readership to Little Pip, a wee penguin who loses her way. Re-teaming with Jane Chapman, the illustrator on Karma’s wildly successful Bear books, Pip’s story is delightful. And we have posted a few of the spreads on her site.

SwapAnd most definitely NOT for kids, Cathy Yardley released the next of her Fairy Tale Takes with Ravish: The Awakening of Sleeping Beauty. The excerpt on her site is pretty much the only G-rated passage in the book. Also not for kids, Susanna Carr writing as Jenesi Ash hit with Swap. If you like hot hot tales of the erotic variety, these two are for you.

Finally new this month: Green Goes With Everything, subtitled Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet. Wax designed launch promo items to support eco-warrior Sloan Barnett’s book release, including some gorgeous bookmarks and the invitation to her swanky book release party hosted by the ever-gracious Melanie Ellison and always-fabulous Arianna Huffington (and Willow Bay and Zem Joaquin who are both quite lovely, but whom I don’t know well enough to personally kvell over). Sloan’s book is a must have if you are human and living on earth.

New excerpts posted in September: Eloisa James posted an excerpt from When the Duke Returns. Kathryn Caskie posted an excerpt from her forthcoming To Sin with a Stranger, the first in her new series. CJ Carmichael started the holidays early with an excerpt from Christmas with Daddy. Alisa Kwitney posted several pages from her forthcoming graphic YA, Token. And Maya Rodale gave us readers not only an excerpt from The Rogue and The Rival, but also another installment in her fabulous online serial, Darcy Darlington and the Diamond of Desire.

This post is already too long (I can’t help it that “my” authors are so prolific!), so I will pop back here in about a week to tell you about our new launches.

And because I am in the know, I can assure you there is a lot more coming in October. Stay tuned.

Posted by Emily Cotler •• Filed in Fun Site Features, The Book Business, new content •• Comments (5)

Keyboard usability… as a metaphor

by Emily Cotler
September 17, 2008 – 7:38 am

Has anyone else noticed that the HELP key is so near to the DELETE key? This drives me absolutely nuts. Today I may have actually growled. It doesn’t happen often — maybe once or twice a month I hit the HELP key when I want to delete and then I have to wait while the Help window opens. Once or twice isn’t bad considering I am a lousy typist. But it’s enough to make me swear out loud, disrupt my train of thought, and potentially put me a bad mood. In my book, it’s akin to the JUNK button living right next to the SEND AND RECEIVE button in Microsoft Entourage. How dumb is that?

Frustration — the avoidance of such — should be the number one things to strive for when designing for usage. On a website, when opening a home page suddenly blares music (why? WHY?), or navigation forces the user to hunt and hit dead ends and backtrack in order to finish a task, or [[insert your "favorite" website annoyance]]. Why do designers opt for features that will undoubtedly annoy users? I can only surmise that testing wasn’t done. But can it really be that they don’t know? Seriously? (Do I do this? Please email me if I do. Seriously.)

But back to my keyboard. I have to love my keyboard. I touch it all day long. That’s a relationship. Mine is the old Macally iKey (pictured above). I love the pressure of the keys and the angle — everything about it, except for the problematic proximity of the HELP key (which I never use), to the delete key, which — like the center of the space bar — no longer has finish on it. I realize that the extended keyboard is a standard and Macally didn’t decide to put it there, but I challenge some maverick product designer to be brazen enough to think outside the box on this one and consider updating that which is established, but not working so well, and put the HELP key elsewhere, like Siberia.

What bugs you?

Posted by Emily Cotler •• Filed in Understanding Audience, Web Design, Working on the web •• Comments (5)

The RWA Conference - My first time (Part Two)

by Abi Bowling
September 11, 2008 – 3:38 pm

About a month ago I mentioned that in my copious free time I was hoping to cull together a little video of all of our author-clients who were at RWA signing away at the Literacy Signing. Truth is, folks, my free time has not been copious! We generate quite a bit of work from our one-on-one time with our clients at RWA, and my time has therefore been spent on client projects, which is frankly how it should be, yes?

So sadly, I will not have a video to show you, but I will leave those of you still pining for that wonderful group of days in San Francisco with a little list of clients’ posts about the conference. In these posts you will find pictures, funny stories, good advice, and more.

And so, for your last look back at San Francisco, here are some good posts to check out, of you haven’t already done so:

Elizabeth Boyle wrote a great post about conference here.
Jane Porter talks about her conference and provides a link to pictures.
Hope Tarr gave us a few photos here and here, and a great post about her conference here.
Kathryn Caskie’s got a quick post here which includes a slew of great photos.
Pam Rosenthal wraps up her posts on RWA for Shy writers. More RWA from Pam here and here.
Susanna Carr has several fun posts: here, here, and also here.

Thanks, folks!

Posted by Abi Bowling •• Filed in Events •• Comments (1)

Server cognizance

by Emily Cotler
August 25, 2008 – 7:11 am

Server maintenanceOn Valentine’s Day our server went down.

You might think, one ought to be smooching one’s honey on Valentine’s Day, not tooling on the computer. But we host a significant number of romance novelists. And whether it’s fair or true to associate Valentine’s Day with romance or if that’s just a hyped up Hallmark manufacture, the fact remains that romance novelists by and large update their sites for Valentine’s Day and run various promotions. So, for our server to go down precisely then was an ulcer-worthy disaster.

But this post isn’t about ironic timing. It’s about the fact that servers are actually hardware: machines with fans and plugs and circuits and components that don’t do well in floods or massive power outages or someone’s failure to dust. We tend to consider the internet to be this amorphous, yet dependable “out there”, often forgetting that it is comprised of machines with moveable parts and people monitoring said parts… People who hopefully speak the same language as you.

So imagine for a moment that on the day you advertise a big promotion on your site, with media tie-in and audience expectation, there is an electrical storm in the city where your server is. Your site goes down. What do you do? What can you do?

I read somewhere that Martha Stewart has a server in her basement. I once mentioned that to Abi, and without missing a beat she said, “No way are we sticking the Wax server in my basement.” What she was really saying was: “No way am I going to be the only person in charge of our server.” What did I want to do, make her a walking basket case?

Caring for a server must be a really nerve-wracking job. The only time anyone notices you is when something goes wrong. Our server is three thousand miles away. Sometimes that gives me hives. But it is monitored 24/7 by people who do nothing but servers, and that is some comfort. We talk to them often. Even when nothing is broken.

Where is your server? Do you know?

Posted by Emily Cotler •• Filed in Working on the web •• Comments (8)

How old is your browser?

by Emily Cotler
August 14, 2008 – 5:23 pm

I found myself at my printer’s this morning waiting for a press check. If you have ever done a press check you know it is both incredibly worth while and a sometimes frustrating waste of time. You need to be there to make sure the job is printing the way you want. It’s your last chance to make adjustments. “Can I go a little deeper on the magenta?” I asked. “To warm up her face?” Sure, but I have to wait a bit while they do that.

That waiting kills me. And I knew I would have it, so I brought something I was supposed to read on my thumbdrive. But the only available-to-me mac in the shop was the dinosaur on OS9 and my thumbdrive was incompatible. I know, all your jaws dropped, but if you think about it, it makes sense for them to have a workstation on OS9 if even only one of their long time clients is still sending them legacy files. So instead of work, I thought I would check our blog and see if I could do some blog hopping and commenting.

Our home page, on I.E. 5.0 for the mac. Yikes!

Our home page, on I.E. 5.0 for the mac. Yikes!

But this is what I found when I went to our site! This is what our site looks like on an old version of Internet Explorer. Yikes. And the choose your mood feature didn’t work.

Our designers upgrade their browsers immediately. (I always stay one step behind them so we can test on both versions in the studio.) If you don’t upgrade your browsers you will eventually start having a lot of problems, especially as all new sites are launching in CSS and so many sites are converting their old design to CSS or at least a hybrid. And at first you won’t even know you are having problems. Things will load slower and with gaps. You may not know… until it looks like this.

To be fair, this is an egregious example. This is a browser so old I can’t imagine that anyone is still on it. I couldn’t even access my webmail on it. But sometimes with examples you have to be hyperbolic.

Staying updated is important. As a rule I never jump in on the first upgrade of any system software. I let the gotta-have-it-first-bunch work their way through the bugs. I prefer to wait a few months until whatever needs to be patched is patched. Plus, with system upgrades, invariably some of my essential software chokes and suddenly half my fonts go missing or my accounting software freezes — things I have to stop everything to deal with.

And stopping everything to deal with crashes makes me really, really cranky.

So for some things I say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My studio is still on OSX 10.4. I know, I know. 10.5 is the coolest and Oh, the features! But our essential time tracking software would require an upgrade and I hate the new version. LOATHE it. Every time they upgrade it it gets worse for us. I still miss the version that ran on system 9.

So we are waiters. But not with browsers. Never with browsers. Except for me (see above).

Anyone else wait to upgrade? Or do you jump right in?

Posted by Emily Cotler •• Filed in Web Aesthetics, Web Design •• Comments (11)

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