It’s impossible to determine exactly how many author Web sites are in existence. Well, maybe not impossible but we certainly not going to attempt it.

Instead, we examined the fiction reviews in the May 1 issue of Kirkus to see how many of the 65 authors in that list had Web sites. Answer: 40 (62%).

How many of those Web sites are good quality? (Yes, that’s a subjective evaluation but we’ve seen a lot of Web sites over the last 14 years and know a few things about graphic design): 13 (33%)

How many of these authors have blogs? 3

Wait, make that really only 1. The other two are “blog like” but do not take advantage of easy-to-use blogging software. More on that in another post.

Here’s the list of sites we examined. Some of these sites could use a lot of improvement but, obviously, we’re not going to say publicly which sites are badly designed.

• Kim Addonizio
• Jonis Agee
• Taylor Antrim
• Deborah Turrell Atkinson
• James Lee Burke
• Tori Carrington
• Ellen Crosby
• Jennifer S Davis
• Jeffery Deaver
• David Ellis
• Diane Fanning
• Susan Fletcher
• Christopher Fowler
• Stephanie Gayle
• W.E.B Griffin
• Homer Hickam
• Victoria Hislop
• Christian Jungersen
• Elise Juska
• Susan Kandel
• J.A.Konrath
• Con Lehane
• Richard K Morgan
• J.D Rhoades
• Nora Roberts
• Michael Robotham
• Betty Rowlands
• Matt Ruff
• Sally Spencer
• Wesley Stace
• Sarah Strohmeyer
• Shirley Tallman
• Victoria Thompson
• Camilla Trinchieri
• Jonathan Tropper
• Thrity Umrigar
• Eric Van Lustbader
• Daniel Wallace
• Chuck Zito

The process of reviewing these sites has raised a number of issues and we’re going to be talking about those in upcoming posts. Also, it’s often difficult to determine which site is really the author’s site as opposed to a fan site or put up by the author’s publisher or academic department. We’ll be talking about those issues. Also, we will be highlighting some of the sites that we thought were particularly good as well as offering some suggestions for how other sites can be improved.