Having an online presence is critical for writers to market their work. In a recent blog post, author John Scalzi urged writers to purchase their own domain name online.
Scalzi (pictured, via) reminded readers that before Facebook, Internet users migrated between AOL, Friendster, MySpace and other sites. He encouraged writers to use trendy tools to connect with readers, but stressed the importance of owning a steady domain like “www.yourname.com.”

Here’s an excerpt from his blog post: “If you’re going to be online, it’s best to have a site that isn’t at the whims of stock evaluation, or a corporate merger, or an ambitious executive’s ‘content strategy,’ or whatever. Ultimately, your online home should be something you control, and something you can point the people at Facebook (or MySpace, or Friendster, etc) to. Having one’s own domain isn’t always simple and has its own share of headaches (as you will find if you ever have the need to change your ISP), but at the end of the day what it has is stability.”