No, not my waistline. I’m expanding my web presence. I put LaurenMilfinger.com on the web last week, started this blog, and now I’ve added Twitter to the mix. You can follow me at http://www.twitter.com/laurenmilfinger, or @laurenmilfinger. It’s so cool to discover I could use my own name and not have to add any qualifiers! How often does that happen these days?
So, why am I tweeting and blogging and starting my own website? It’s called publicity. I’m an author. I write books, screenplays, short stories, even completely legitimate, not remotely sexy articles, essays, and what have you. The last of those mostly under a different name. The thing is, none of that pays very well. It used to pay a lot better, but that was before every character with a computer and access to the Internet decided he was going to get rich by selling a novel on Amazon. The flood of poorly-written books not only reflects on all the good ones, it makes them a lot harder to find. An online presence outside Amazon helps with visibility. It’s even more helpful when you’re not on Amazon. My erotica is pu
blished and sold by Lot’s Cave, because Amazon won’t list it.
I’ve got plans for the website. It’s there to plug my books, obviously, but the older I get, the more concerned I become with eventually being able to retire. I love writing, yet I’m fairly sure I don’t want to be spending ten hours a day in front of a computer when I’m 84. So I’ll be including other features. Book reviews are an obvious addition. And there will be a member’s section, once the technical part is worked out. We have to get hooked up with a payment processor, and set up a gallery. We’ll have pictures in there, because I do appreciate beauty and I find naked women particularly beautiful. There will likely be story fragments. Those hot, sensual bits that for some reason or other either didn’t make it into a book, or were going to be a book but just didn’t come together. You don’t need a plot to write a sex scene, but you do need one to make it into a novel.