I’m delighted to announce that my new website is live! Honey, you’re looking at it right now.
I have enjoyed working on it so much. It’s been a joy to collaborate with Caitlin O’Brient Bauer at Royal Digital Studio. Man, is she ever thorough! (Not to mention creative, smart, and fun to work with.)
What are you going to find here? Everything good! All the best stuff about me and my books gathered, organized, and prettified for your reading and viewing pleasure.
Some Highlights
We had some practical goals with the website: to make it a rich and fun source of information, and to include the tech stuff all good websites need (apparently there’s something called SEO, and you can optimize it); but also to deeply reflect who I am and what’s cool about what I’m doing.
In the “hero image” on the main page (Don’t you love that term? Just one of the great bits of web design jargon I picked up.) you’ll find images taken from each of my 6 books. Can you identify each book?
Another effort we made to clarify my brand was to add a tagline. There was a process with this—I took to Facebook and the (really cool) crowd-polling site PickFU to try out some new taglines.
Choices included:
Emmy Laybourne writes about good kids in serious danger.
Emmy Laybourne writes about young people in bad trouble.
Emmy Laybourne writes about good kids in real trouble.
♦ ♦ ♦
And the winner, which you can see on the home page:
Emmy Laybourne writes about good kids in bad trouble.
This is true going back to my first book, Monument 14, up to my latest, Ransacker (coming out January 29, 2019).
I have to tell you about a really nice thing that happened during the process of developing the website. Caitlin needed me to check out the Press Kit and I saw that she’d collected all the prizes and awards I’ve won. Whoa. I’d never seen them all together. Some of them I hadn’t known I’d even received (Hello, Iowa Teen Award Young Adult Nominee). It was such a pleasure to stumble upon that list!
I’m also really proud of the Merch page. It was so, so, so fun to work with the talented artists represented there.
I especially loved collaborating with Natasha Silvestro of the Dio Candle Company on scent ideas based on all books. She’s come up with an amazing Author’s Flight of candles. It comes with a little note from me and the candles have scents that will complement your reading of my books. How cool is that?
Next month I will be giving away a set of candles from Dio to help you with your Holiday shopping. Stay tuned for the next issue of my newsletter for a chance to enter that giveaway!
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Xoxo,
