Frequently ask your questions, pls

That was the subject of an email I sent to a grip of my friends the other day asking for questions I could answer on the as-yet-nonexistent Frequently Asked Questions section of the SUPER AWESOME WEBSITE that’s being built. Can we talk about this website for a minute? It’s going to be awesome. I’ll give you a hint:

Yeah. Get ready! We’re hoping to launch March 16th.

I’ll tell you, I’ve seen a lot of author websites, some that are great and some that are hideous. I wanted to have one that was great, but also easy to use (on my end and on the visitors’ end). I wanted to be able to maintain and update my own content, so my designer is going to build the thing on WordPress. I wanted the design to be general, not book specific, because I didn’t want to have to deal with a redesign in 2011 when MB comes out. BUT, the design takes its cue from something in the book, so it’s not wholly unrelated. I wanted it to be fun and bright because that’s what I can stand looking at all the time, but I wanted the design to be simple and sophisticated. We came up with a concept that I think is going to work.

The thing that’s most exciting to me about the site, though, is that we’re going to sprinkle some hidden content throughout the pages, just to give it that possibility of discovery. Don’t worry, it won’t be too complicated, I hate that; there will be an explanation in the “About the Site” page so that people know what to look for, if not what they’re getting. I haven’t decided what all the hidden content is going to be yet, but I have a feeling that .jpgs of a few pages of my character manifestos will probably be in the mix.

This was a long way of saying that if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them! At the moment I have a hodgepodge collection of questions that range from the serious (“How did you decide that you wanted to write a mystery?”) to the silly (“If you were a tree, what sort of tree would you be?”). Actually, the silly outnumber the serious 2:1. So if you have a question, please leave it in the comments or email me at anna {D.O.T} jarzab {A.T} gmail {D.O.T} com.

Oh, and just in case I’m not the absolute last person in the whole internets to know about this, Kristi, editor of the awesome YA book blog site The Story Siren, has begun to compile a directory of YA book blog sites. There are sites on there written by YA readers and there’s also a list of YA author blogs and websites for your perusal. This is such a great resource.

Also, because apparently this is going to be one of those posts where I dump everything I’m thinking/have done, this weekend I read Courtney Summers‘ Cracked Up to Be. I have a couple of things to say about this book and they go as follows (the grammatical dubiousness of that sentence baffles even myself):

A. It’s excellent. Just excellent. I loved it.

B. Courtney Summers is one of my favorite YA author bloggers. I wish she would post more, because I enjoy reading her stuff.

C. I’ve known about Cracked Up to Be for a while now even though I only read it this weekend, and to be honest I always thought it was supposed to be, like, Cracked Up-to-Be, like, “bride-to-be” or “mother-to-be”. Like, you’re going to crack up but you haven’t quite yet. It wasn’t until I started reading more of Courtney’s blog that I realized it was just the last four words of the phrase “it’s not all it’s cracked up to be”. In my head, I still think of it the other way.

Anyway, I highly recommend Cracked Up to Be, and Courtney’s website.

Also, this weekend I went to see The Reader and ended up meeting Andrew Bird. New York!