I love Twitter. I love it's brevity. Currently it is the easiest and most efficient way to keep up with what's going on Out There, through following links tweeted by people who are interesting in the things I'm interested in, without it taking up a whole lot of writing time.

There's a lot of information, opinion, advice and fun to be had. But its way too easy to go from one article to the next blog entry and forget to take a step back and ask 'says who?'. This is probably most important with advice. It takes me back to the days when people first realised they could type their symptoms into a search engine and get a whole lot of medical advice. The best advice then was: make sure the website is a good source. The same should apply to writing advice and opinion. Though obviously what one person regards as a good source will vary from another's, and nobody's life or health is at stake.

Keeping this in mind that has made me spot a peculiar little problem with the way some authors present themselves and their books on the internet (and I'm talking about book/short story authors here). It's as if they're concentrating so hard on being cool and interesting and opinionated in their blogs, weighing in on the latest scandal, and writing up lists of five or ten or twenty pieces of advice, that they've forgotten that what makes them an author is the fact that they've written stuff like, well, books.

I've lost count of the times I've followed a link to an author's blog, or read an article by or about them, and thought, 'this person is interesting: what have they written?' and then can't easily find any information about their work.

Oh, I can go look them up on an online bookstore, but online bookstores don't necessarily tell me what series the books belong to and what order to read them in. I can go to Wikipedia but, well, much as I love Wikipedia it isn't always accurate or up to date. I can go to a publisher site, but I may not know what the author's publisher is, and they may have more than one publisher, or the publisher doesn't keep their site up to date. Maybe the author is self published. Even more reason for information to be easily available.

Obviously, there are authors sites (and blogs and twitter feeds) that just scream LOOK AT MY BOOKS! It's possible to take it too far in the other direction. I'm just saying that if a person types an author's name into a search engine they shouldn't remain mystified about the books that author has written. It's really not hard for an author to have basic information like titles, covers, series, and maybe a bit of a blurb up on a web page, or somewhere obvious on their blog. (Doesn't have to include a release date – believe me I know how hard it is to get accurate release dates.)

So here's my list of five effective ways to be an author on the internet:

1. Makes sure when someone looks for you they immediately find clear information on your books

2. See no 1.

3, 4 & 5. See no 1.

Once you've covered that base, go on with being cool and interesting and opinionated and writing all those top ten lists of advice. They might be the reason someone wanted to find out about your books in the first place, but at least make sure that person comes away armed with the information they need to actually buy your books.

(Oh, and if you came here looking for info on my books, it's all under the Books menu above.)