January 2008: The Beginning

Happy New Year!

2008 is the year Dr. Olaf van Schuler's Brain is coming out, and I'm starting to prepare. According to Author 101 Bestselling Book Publicity, writing the book is five percent of the work and publicizing it is ninety-five percent. Though I question those numbers (I spent the last six years writing Dr. Olaf), I believe that the publicity effort requires some, well, effort. And today, I have officially begun.

I decided to kick things off with a new web site. It's not up yet, but I made tremendous progress by (1) starting out with a pre-existing template from AllWebCo Design Corporation and (2) registering and hosting my domains with goddady.com (rather than fussing with "free" hosting from a friend). I have no affiliation with either of these companies--they just seemed like the best options based on my research, so I thought I'd share. The total cost of today's efforts came to about three hundred dollars. Here's how that breaks down:

Template: $85
Hosting (one year): $75.46
Domain Names: $134.26

Yup. Domain names were my biggest expense. This is the problem with unruly names like mine (and my book's). I registered:

MENGERANDERSON.com
MENGER-ANDERSON.COM
KIRSTENMENGERANDERSON.COM
KIRSTENMENGER-ANDERSON.COM
DROLAFVANSCHULERSBRAIN.COM
DOCTOROLAFVANSCHULERSBRAIN.COM
KIRSTEN.WS

Of course, Godaddy.com also recommended that I register .org, .net, .etc etc etc for each domain, to protect my "brand," but I stuck with the .coms EXCEPT for kirsten.ws. WS? Yes, it may sound useless, but that's what I thought about kirsten.net ten years or so ago when I decided not to register it and now I regret that decision. So. Kirsten.ws it is.

I hope to get a site up soon. In the meantime, I'm just happy to look at the parking spot. If you have any great publicity ideas, or are publicizing a book and want to promote it here, please share!