Year Zero has a Website!!

Warning: this post was composed at midnight after a heavy Beethoven session. May contain banality!!

www.yearzerowriters.wordpress.com It’s 2 days in and we’ve had 176 hits so far. Now there’s a Bridget Jones type thing to keep you updated on! And we’ve had some lovely comments for which a huge thank you!

Some of our writers have started posting their profiles there already, including Oli Johns, whose Benny Platonov is one of the first books to be released, on September 1st. It’s still right at the nascent stages so be patient. But you’ll start to get a feel for who each of us is and how we write.

Every writer needs a website. So does every writers’ collective. We knew that. We also knew it had to be a free one. But that was about it.

So why Wordpress? Well, I won’t say we’re done with thinking this through, but let me give you a little insight into where we are so far.

We’ve been hatching our plots for quite some time now. Since January, in fact, when we first decided 2009 was the year we should give it a shot, and do the very best job we cold of the collective lark. We’ve been doing it on a [secret] Facebook group, with Sarah’s bra as our rallying logo. Secret Facebook groups are great for hatching plots. It’s a social networking site so it suits cabalistic connivances. We’ve been able to do things like hold a 24 hour marketing brainstorm session across gazillions of timezones, which generated 118 posts.

But Facebook’s not really ideal as a website with all the copyright stuff. We have a Ning site (www.yearzero.ning.com), with some amazing graphics thanks to our techie genius Garalt, which is super. Ning’s a fantabulous whizzy do it yourself social networking site. So you can have your own groups without any of the copyright problems. Do come and join ours and see how you like the site! The problem with it is there’s no central area where we can say this is who we are and this is what we do. No real structure at all. Social networks are great for interacting, and we all want to do lots of interacting with our readers. But we also want somewhere that’s nicely structured where our readers can have a look and see who we are, what we do, and who writes what.

Wordpress seems to tick all the boxes. Or it did when I set it up, but as soon as I’d done that Sarah messaged me to say I should’ve used blogger because she’s a whiz at doing themy things with html on it! What Wordpress does let you do is structure the site. The first thing we needed was an orderly way to display the profiles and work of the 13 of us who’ve put work into our sampler, which we’ll be launching on July 1st. Wordpress lets us create a profiles section with 13 sub-sections, all of which can be further subdivided (it’s administrator’s heaven!!)

So that’s how we arrived where we are. We have a central site, with which we are very happy, and which we can stuff with cool content until it’s positively bursting with goodies. From there people can find each of our footprints, that roam far and wide across the web, sucking people unwittingly into that one central honeypot.

At some point I’ll go over how we all use our other virtual bits and bobs. I’m a huge fan of twitter, for example, and have found it a wonderful place to meet other people who love books and the whole indie scene. Sarah, on the other hand, because she’s dead good with images, uses deviantart. We all have blogger accounts, and I can’t be the only one who’s got a YouTube channel (agnieszkasshoes), whilst Octavia is ahead of the game and puts her books up on textnovel. All of this is well worth a who does what and why blog at some point. But right now the alarm’s due to go off in 5 hours and I haven’t had my bath yet.


Tomorrow: all about Free-e-day, the biggest FREE celebration of independent creativity ever seen.