I'm starting to piece together a website to promote Paragaea: A Planetary Romance, and spending a lot of time looking at other book sites. Not so much publishers' sites, but rather the ones that writers build to promote their own books. Like the sites for Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or Charles Stross's Accelerando. Two recent additions that are particularly sexy and muscular are sites for Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain and for David Louis Edelman's Infoquake (the latter of which I had the chance to read in manuscript; it's a corker!). There's a lot that I like about both of them, not least of which the sheer amount of information on them. Charlie's and Cory's sites have the advantage of having the full text of their novels available for download (while David and Tobias have sample chapters of theirs online), and while I won't be doing that with Paragaea, I will be releasing the full text of my novel Set the Seas on Fire under a Creative Commons license, since it features the introduction of Hieronymus Bonaventure, one of the protagonists of Paragaea (it isn't at all necessary to have read the former to appreciate Paragaea, but I figured I'd make the novel available, just to play fair).

(As an illustration of my early senility that is already setting in, a brief anecdote. Last summer, I thought it might be a good idea to register www.paragaea.com, thinking I might use it to promote the book. I was bummed to discover, through Network Solutions, that it wasn't available. Then I thought, well, who the hell would have registered my made-up name? Is someone screwing with me? So I did a Whois search on the domain, and was surprised to see that I owned it. I'd registered the domain myself the year before, thinking I might use it to promote the book, and promptly forgot all about it. I shudder to think what will happen when the years really start to pile on...)

The site should probably go live in the next month or so, assuming that I can get all the bits and pieces together. I'll be doing it myself, so I doubt very seriously that it'll be anywhere near as sexy or muscular as the above examples (my web fu is weak), but hopefully it'll be utilitarian enough to get the job done.