Ah, I see. Although each service is free, you get a lot of ads. You can upgrade to a paid service to get rid of the ads, get customization features, other goodies. The catch is that you need to do a separate upgrade for each service. If you don’t mind the ads, however, this could still be an inexpensive way for an author to enhance a site or to do promotional mailings.
From the monthly archives:
January 2003
I’m working on my Press Kit (author promotion) column for next month. Going through the e-mail comments from users in response to my last column, I became intrigued by the repeated mention of Bravenet by authors who were using it for hosting or newsletter services.
I checked it out. Wow, quite a lot of useful-looking Webmaster tools, including guestbooks, discussion forums, newsletter mailing services, hosting services, polls, lots more. All potentially useful author promotional tools, and all suspiciously free. I mean…what’s the catch? Will I get obnoxious ads as part of the service, or be put on a spam list without my permission?
I’ve signed up under my “test user” Yahoo account to test it out.
Author Max Barry has a unique way of promoting his book, Jennifer Government. NationStates is a nation simulation game based on the novel, where users can “create” their own nations and governments. Under the FAQ “Why did you make this?” section, Barry writes: “Because it seemed like a fun idea, and a way to let people know about my novel Jennifer Government. With luck, some of the people who play NationStates will buy the book. Then my publisher will think I am a left-field marketing genius, instead of a chump who blew four months on a web game when he should have been working on his next novel.”
MaxEmail seems to be working out fine so far. Easy to set up, and I’ve send and received several faxes so far with no problem. Looks like we can get rid of our second phone line as well as our poor-quality fax machine!
I’ve updated My Life In A Nutshell. Yes, this really happened. 
I’ve seen questions about copyright posted in several writers’ message boards and lists, so figured it would be a good thing to point out the excellent resource that Moira Allen has on Writing-World.com, including Moira’s article, “Understanding Rights and Copyright“. Be sure to check out the rest of the site for other useful resources, if you haven’t already!
