When I set up my author website two years ago, I kept it very simple by not adding a blog. At the time, I had only one publication credit and didn’t have enough experience to make a writer-centric blog worthwhile. That was back then. Now that I have a long credit list and enough experience to blog once a week—more or less—about being a fiction writer, it was time to add a blog.
Except I still had the same problem from two years ago: no money.
As fiction writers are too well familiar with, rejection slips don’t pay the bills and what does come in doesn’t amount to anything. My first published short story earned me $3.02 USD in cash—or 1/4 cent per word USD—that came in an envelope without a return address. These days I’m lucky to get $20 USD here and there. My monthly writing expenses comes to $100 USD per month, and I’m still trying to break even every month. If I was going to add a blog to the website, the software had to be free.
I used Joomla! CMS to manage the content on my websites, which doesn’t come with a blog/comment component. When I set up my personal blog with Joomla in January 2008, I paid for the My Blog and JomComment components to get the blog functionality I needed. Looking through all the available free blog/comment components this week, I was reminded why I paid for those components in the first place. All the free stuff wasn’t that good. If I had the money, I would’ve gotten new licenses for my author website.
After looking around at blogging alternatives, WordPress became an obvious choice. I created a new subdomain to install the blogging software on my author website. In effect, I’m running two websites side by side. If you ever set up a Joomla website before, setting up a WordPress website was relatively painless. The hardest part was picking a good theme. I went with the Minimalism theme after playing around with a half-dozen similar themes. Took only a few tweaks to get the colors and layout done. As I familiarize myself with all the available WordPress features and plug, I’ll be making additional tweaks as needed.
My author website now has a writer-centric blog. For writing and putting up a blog, WordPress is really nice and in some ways better than what is available for a Joomla website. The only thing that hasn’t really change is the fact that it still takes me about 90 minutes to pull together a blog post.
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