Sonnet Media LLC

Latest Blog Posts & News

For Working Authors: A Website with A Secret

If you’re an author, you know that there are times for writing and there are times for getting out to promote your writing. Those times don’t always coincide. What happens when your readers go to find you on the Web when you’re working on the next book?

There’s nothing worse than a Web page with nothing but whitespace; no one likes to waste their precious click only to find “No events here, check back later.” Bad.

Dealing with a lot of authors we’ve figured out some ways to manage this. First, we create events sections to automatically show future events only. You don’t have to go back in and clean up old events so you don’t have to worry about your Web page showing that you last gave a reading when the Berlin Wall was still standing.

For those with a lot of events we do display past events when there are none in the future, but these are shown as an orderly archive. That helps by showing activity and setting up expectations for something to come. For some we combine news and events so when events disappear there’s news on the page.

But what if you’re spending most of your time writing right now? Dallas Hudgens is a writer with two novels to his credit. He had a blog once but really wanted to spend his time writing fiction. We created a site for him to showcase his books and the great reviews they received and even though he’s not out doing events right now, we wanted the site prepared, so we created places for news, events and other writing.

Fine, but what to do with those sections when they’re not being used? We hid them!

We told the code to say “if there are no future events hide the events page and the menu item leading to it.” If you’re technically inclined you know that this could cause problems with search engines, but we managed that by telling the code to say “if there’s no content on this page then tell the search engines that this page doesn’t exist.”

When there are events or news, they show up (in Dallas’s case both in the menu and in the about section) and you don’t have to do anything.

Click on the image above to see a screenshot of the front page of Dallas’s site if he currently had events and then visit his site to see what it looks like now. This may not be the solution for everyone, but we feel it works here. For every author we consider their individual situation and build the site based on a strategy for them. We also work closely with publicists when appropriate to make sure that the site fits with their strategy too.

Got ideas for the perfect author Website? Share them because we’re continually working to build sites that help your audience find you and help you not to worry about your Website.

Offline Access for Gmail is Finally Here

Finally, the online and offline worlds take a big leap toward convergence with Google’s gmail going offline. It works through a program called Google Gears that stores your data on your browser. I’ve been using Google Gears for offline access my “Remember The Milk” online to-do list app`for a while now and it works seamlessly. I also use a lot of Gmail “Labs” features - beta releases of features that may be included in the standard version at some point - and have had nary a problem.

Skylight Pictures “State of Fear” project subject of Center for Social Media Report

The Center for Social Media recently published a report on how documentary filmmakers are using new tools to reach out to the public on the causes their films address. The report by Barbara Abrash, “Social Issue Documentary:  The Evolution of Public Engagement,” lauds the creators of State of Fear among others,  for how they’ve used innovative technologies to engage their audience.

Skylight’s excellent film about Perú‘s healing after years of devastation by terrorists, both the Shining Path and the state-supported terrorism on the part of the Fujimori government, is subtitled “The Truth about Terrorism.” The film has struck a nerve with audiences all around the world (it was broadcast in over 150 countries), but perhaps no where as strongly as with Peruvians themselves.

While Skylight fully engages the world with social media and things like good old face to face outreach meetings (incredible to be a part of), the EDMQuechua (Estado de Miedo) project brought State of Fear to the Peruvian interior where the Quechua language dominates. Paco de Onís, Skylight’s producer, sent out a bunch of easy to use Flip video cameras to human rights workers in Perú and had them film testimonials at screenings.

For our part of the project, Sonnet Media built a micro-Website to locate screening information on Google maps, pull in news feeds from the trial of Fujimori (which got underway about the same time), photos from screenings and most importantly video and written testimony from those at the screenings. Technically speaking, we created a simple form for users to submit their videos or commentary, all of which became part of our database for use on the site.

It’s a great pleasure to work with a group of people who not only change the world, but also who embrace new means to engage their audience, putting social media to great use. In fact, embrace puts it lightly; Paco drives the use of social media and Skylight Pictures as a whole pushes every tool at their disposal to make their message heard. We’ve been consulting on their latest audience engagement project, IJCentral, and will have more to report on that soon.

Sonnet Media Launches Book Site for David Grann’s “The Lost City of Z”

All of our projects are fun, some more than others. The Website for the book The Lost City of Z was a lot of fun, partly because David Grann, writer for the venerable New Yorker Magazine, was great to work with. A self-confessed luddite, he quickly became an enthusiastic participant in his site, jumping in to add and revise copy, and always with valuable input. Here’s what he said…

“Bud Parr and Sonnet Media did something truly amazing with the website for The Lost City of Z. They not only made the site into a place where one can easily access information about the book but they also made it as visually arresting and alluring as the heart of the jungle.”

Sonnet Media Launches Film Site, The Greatest Silence, for Jackson Films

  We are very happy when we help bring great films to a new audience through the Web and working on The Greatest Silence, which won a Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, was a rewarding experience. Lisa Jackson’s film about the heinous crimes being committed against women in the Congo is an important work and hopefully through the Website Lisa’s team will enable more outreach and get the word out.

Lisa says: “Yeah Bud - you have done such an amazing job transforming our paleolithic site and turning it into something new, powerful, connecting and affecting.  Thank you so much compadre.”

For this project we did a complete redesign of an existing site and incorporated a blog, screening calendar, outreach pages, Flash-based slide shows and trailer, all in an easily to update content management system.