Yo! Hey! Can anybody hear me? I’m shouting out from deep in this rabbit hole on website-building. I hate to say the C-word, but it’s happening. No more a swashbuckling writer, I have become a lowly CONTENT-PROVIDER. Tell the truth, I am having a blast. I’ve been contemplating the traditional Author’s Website. You’ve got the books, with clickable elaboration. That’s the backbone of it and rightly so. You’ve got a brief, professional biography, some contact information, a few hi-res images of the guilty party . . . and that’s basically it. Utilitarian, right? Sell those books. But down here in the rabbit hole, poking around, I find a world of possibilities that I, for one, have failed to investigate. I’m dreaming of a website, dare I reveal it, that is less a marketing tool than a rough-hewn work of art – a multi-media extravaganza in cyberspace. Many authors, I know, have passed this way. Bear with me: I am a slow learner. But as content for my new website, along with the usual, I am providing short videos I've made and songs I've written, one photo-gallery of adventures and another of paintings by Sheena. Yup, she has been with me all the way and deserves to be acknowledged. What’s that? Who would want to spend time exploring such a site? Well, maybe nobody. I can live with that. But the same question pertains to any book you write: who will want to read THIS? Bottom line: I’m going with Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come.
Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.
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