Check Out My Website...Oh, Never Mind. I'm On Facebook

I'll never forget when I purchased my domain name and built my first website: www.Judy5cents.com.

It was back in 2003, when my first book Caviar Dreams was about to be published.

We had dial up internet service then. I must have tied up the phone lines for hours setting it up. I used a web site provider called Tripod which is still around. I started off with the free service that displayed ads, then when the book came out I upgraded my plan to get rid of them.

I felt so proud of my website. I updated the content constantly. I had contests and wrote my own column, which I called "Your Nichols' Worth." I'm not sure if the word "blog" or even "weblog" had been coined yet.

It was a long time ago.

Thirteen years later and I still have a website. But most of the time I forget it's even there. I updated it today, a sad thing for me as it was to take down the wonderful blurb my friend Joyce Lavene said about my second book Tree Huggers "Judy Nichols is a gifted author and I can't wait to read her next book."

Joyce passed away a few years ago and having her saying on my website that she couldn't wait to read my next book when that was never going to happen seemed wrong, even if no one ever sees it.

These days, my internet presence is through social media--Facebook, Twitter and this blog. I'm starting to wonder if I should have a website at all.

Which brings me back to a conversation I had with Joyce at the last Cape Fear Crime Festival in Wilmington. in 2013. I said with all the platforms available to authors for promoting themselves, do we really need a website.

She agreed that we're more likely to engage a reader with Twitter or Facebook, but the website she and her husband/writing partner Jim had was the one place where readers could find out about them and all the books they'd written. It's what they put on their flyers and in their books. It was how readers could get in touch with them.

So even though I'm coming up on 20 years with Judy5cents.com, I have no plans to delete it from the internet. It's all here if you want to see it.

And maybe I might update it once in a while.