If you travel a lot then you know the problem of carrying around guidebooks: they can be large and you often don’t use half the chapters in the book. A travel guide friend of mine actually recommends ripping out the pages that you don’t want from a guidebook in order to make it lighter, easier to carry around.

Lonely Planet is introducing downloadable chapters of its guidebooks. The price of each chapter varies but it seems to be around $2.50 or so. It reminds me of the TravelFish guides to southeast Asia that we wrote about last month.

So far, Lonely Planet only has chapters from its Latin American guidebooks available for download. This concept is particularly good for travelers on the road. In many countries it’s very difficult to find English-language travel books.

Agent Kristin has a post on her blog Pub Rants about the importance of an author having a Web site:

I ended up chatting with a B&N book buyer. She said that the most important tool an author could have is a website.

And I agree. The buyers do actually look at author websites and potentially use them for their internet marketing.

She also has some excellent tips about how authors should get creative with their Web sites. Go read the post.

With all the emphasis on platform as a necessity for getting non-fiction published, one might assume that the ratio of non-fiction writers with Web sites would be higher than that of fiction writers.

One recent bit of advice to non-fiction writers: “You need to have a fantastic Website, even before you get an agent.” (link thanks to Joe Wikert).

But based on the July 15 issue of Kirkus non-fiction reviews:

Of the 60 reviewed authors only 24 had Web sites. That’s 40%, which is lower than our calculation for novelists with Web sites.

Amir D. Aczel, THE JESUIT AND THE SKULL
Steve Almond, (NOT THAT YOU ASKED)
Emerson W. Baker, THE DEVIL OF GREAT ISLAND
John D. Barrow, NEW THEORIES OF EVERYTHING
Bill Bass, BEYOND THE BODY FARM
Bob Beckel, COMMON GROUND
Jane Bernstein, RACHEL IN THE WORLD
Nancy Marie Brown, THE FAR TRAVELER
Matthew Brzezinski, RED MOON RISING
James Campbell, THE GHOST MOUNTAIN BOYS
Gillian Clark, OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
Robert Cole, UNDER THE GUN IN IRAQ
Stacy A. Cordery, ALICE
Michael D’Antonio, A BALL, A DOG, AND A MONKEY
Phoebe Damrosch, SERVICE INCLUDED
Christopher J. Dodd, LETTERS FROM NUREMBERG (Ok, Presidential candidates automatically have a publishing platform!)
Dominic Dromgoole, WILL & ME
Norbert Ehrenfreund, THE NUREMBERG LEGACY
Kathleen Flinn, THE SHARPER YOUR KNIFE, THE LESS YOU CRY
James R. Gaines, FOR LIBERTY AND GLORY
John Gray, BLACK MASS
Boze Hadleigh, BROADWAY BABYLON
Lesley Hazleton, JEZEBEL
Andrew Helfer, RONALD REAGAN
Paul Hoffman, KING’S GAMBIT
Corinne Hofmann, REUNION IN BARSALOI
A.J. Jacobs, THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY
Catherine James, DANDELION
Robert D. Kaplan, HOG PILOTS, BLUE WATER GRUNTS
Hugh Kennedy, THE GREAT ARAB CONQUESTS
Glenn Kessler, THE CONFIDANTE
Jon Kukla, MR. JEFFERSON’S WOMEN
Alan Lapidus, EVERYTHING BY DESIGN
Jon Latimer, 1812
Paul Maher, Jr., JACK KEROUAC’S AMERICAN JOURNEY
Cristina Marcano, HUGO CHÁVEZ
Marco Martinez, HARD CORPS
Mark Matthews, THE LOST YEARS
Brian Morton, PRINCE
Michael J. Neufeld, VON BRAUN
Henry Petroski, THE TOOTHPICK
Paul Pines, MY BROTHER’S MADNESS
Norman Podhoretz, WORLD WAR IV
Katherine Ramsland, BEATING THE DEVIL’S GAME
Jim Reisler, THE BEST GAME EVER
John Elder Robison, LOOK ME IN THE EYE
Jessica Snyder Sachs, GOOD GERMS, BAD GERMS
Frank Schaeffer, CRAZY FOR GOD
Richard Shelton, CROSSING THE YARD
Peggy Shumaker, JUST BREATH NORMALLY
Ed Sikov, DARK VICTORY
Barbara Sjoholm, THE PALACE OF THE SNOW QUEEN
Jeffrey Toobin, THE NINE
Lou Ureneck, BACKCAST
Charles Van Onselen, THE FOX AND THE FLIES
Geoffrey C. Ward, THE WAR
Susan Warren, BACKYARD GIANTS
Andrew Wilson, HAROLD ROBBINS
Mort Zachter, DOUGH
Keld Zeruneith, THE WOODEN HORSE

Authors deserve great Web sites and we enjoy working with authors.

As an author you pay serious attention to your writing, but your Web site also needs to be taken seriously and appear as professional as your writing.

We are offering an introductory special (until September 30, 2007) on the design of Web sites for authors, starting at US$500.

We can redesign an existing Web site or help you plan and develop a new site from scratch.

We have significant experience with design and the Web. (Jeff has been developing Web sites since 1993). In addition to our book design work, we now want to put our talents towards creating nicely designed and affordable Web sites for authors.

For more information, please contact us by e-mailing jeff@sorodesign.com

I’m in the process of examining Web sites of non-fiction authors and it’s not surprising that a lot of these writers are also academics. Almost every university provides Web pages for its faculty. Back when I was an academic librarian I was quite involved with encouraging faculty to use these pages and they serve a good function. But a university faculty Web page is not a substitute for an author’s own Web site.

One factor is simply an aspect of design. With an academic site you are often locked into a rather bland, generic design, a look that says nothing about you as a writer. Few universities provide faculty with blogs that are integrated into the faculty pages. So, you will usually need to do that elsewhere. And what happens if you change universities?

Many faculty are committed to staying in one place but, honestly, many academics publish books so that they can move on and up to a more prestigious university or laterally to another respected university offering a better deal. So, when you leave University XYZ then your faculty page at that site usually disappears, too, and you have to start your Web site all over again.

Here are a couple of academics releasing books this year along with examples of their faculty pages.

Emerson Baker

Stacy Cordery