Reinventing The Fiction Desk

Well, the site still needs a nip here and a tuck there, but I think that the new design is starting to take shape. Essentially, what started out as a business site with a blog has become a blog / magazine site which also offers a service. So, why the changes?

First, I’m an incorrigible tinkerer (tinker, verb: attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or desultory way, often to no useful effect) and it’s impossible to resist the temptation to redesign.

Second, only a tiny fraction of the site’s readers are likely to become editing clients—most aren’t even writers—and it felt strange for the overall emphasis of the site to be on the business. Of course that’s important too (it pays for my bread and wine), and I’ve given it slightly more emphasis in the menu at the top. But it’s been relegated to internal pages, and the blog, being the main feature of the site, has been placed at the front.

Apart from this reversal, I’ve also redesigned the front page to give the site a less “bloggy” feel. This is partly to get more information onto the front page (in the old design, only one or two posts were visible at a time), and partly to reinforce the idea of the Fiction Desk as being fixed on a single topic. I want to focus on new fiction, so I’m limiting the book reviews to new publications (or new editions that add something that wasn’t there before), and any articles about older books will be going here in the diary section. Essentially, the diary section is becoming the blog-within-the-blog.

I’ll be writing primarily about UK publications, but not exclusively; many of my readers (and clients) are in America or other parts of the world, and we all have access to books from across the world, so it seems strange to turn a blind eye to these titles. But when an edition is available in the UK, that’s the one I’ll be reviewing.

I’ll also be making more regular updates to the book news section, and adding other bits and pieces as time goes on.