For me, the internet is primarily for research, for business e-mail, and for submissions.

I did a rough chart, and I write thirty hours per six day week, read twenty-five hours per seven day week, spend five hours on fourums, about ten hours researching, and about three dealing with e-mail.

I’m not big on editors Googling my name. I really don’t think this is much of a factor at all. The editors I work with only worry about a bad web presence, not a lack thereof. Web presence gets real easy when the publisher buys your book, and they’ll handle most of it for you.

I’m afraid to admit that my weekly percentages are decidedly unprofessional right now. Too much surfing, not enough reading for pleasure, and never enough time spent on the actual writing itself.

Oh, and video games. I don’t play them much, but when I let myself, I tend to go in all the way. As in, kiss the hours goodbye! Spent the last two days home sick from work, in fact, and the time I should have spent writing was spent instead on Mechwarrior 4. It’s an old game, but Lord, I’m always a sucker for that franchise.

I do think it’s worth noting that some people — like Scalzi — are a curious hybrid of fiction writter and blog mogul. In fact, one might argue that Scalzi is a blogger first and foremost, who broke into fiction writing a few years ago. Now Scalzi’s fiction and his blog sort of feed off of each other, with his name recognition having gone through the roof — at least in geek circles.

You could also point to someone like Larry Correia, who had enough of an on-line pressence to get his self-published novel onto the radar of enough readers that Baen eventually picked him up, and now that same novel is going gangbusters, Larry has more novels on the way, etc.

I think the key for Scalzi and Correia both is that their on-line activity is invested on-line activity. I suspect too many people — not just writers, all kinds of businesses — think that it’s enough to toss up a placeholder web page and blog, jot off the occasional missive, then sit back and call it good. Correia and Scalzi are big-time, active participants in their particular corners of the InterToob, and it’s this activity which continues to generate traffic for their pages and — one reasons — sales for their fiction.

This gives me another kick in the butt to get my website built. I have the domain name but needed to get past this semester and/or complete my current novel before I felt I had the time to devote to a website.

However, your note about an editor Googling struck home for me since I have another novel that I’m actively marketing. An editor might see lots of my nonfiction but the lack of a website would be a strike against me.

Time to find the time to get the website up and runnning.

Dave

Question: Since I won’t be using my ‘real’ name on my books, and am yet unpublished, should I be using my ‘pen’ name?

Denise (another fellow Tenner)