January 2009 (cont.)

In the early years of my career, I left the wilderness of marketing to the professionals in New York. All the children's writers I knew did the same. Not that there was a great deal of marketing going on, but what there was wasn't our—the writers'—responsibility. We were "artists." The function of artists was to create art, then sit back and hope our art might be noticed . . . and wish someone else were doing more to make that happen.

But with the World Wide Web, everything changed. Writers had the capacity—and soon the responsibility—to speak for their own books. And for themselves.

Which brought me to a crucial question . . . how did I want to represent myself and my work to the world?

I started by looking at sites set up by other children's writers and soon found myself feeling . . . well, tired. The sites were interesting. They were visually attractive, sometimes even exciting. And they looked like a lot of work, work that would take me far from the day-to-day writing that has formed the backbone of my career. I had some very good people to set up a site, but the content would be up to me. And it took a long time for me to find the energy needed to begin gathering that content.