And another great site for stories, storytellers and articles about storytelling

Last week I got tagged on Facebook in this entry:

Who has the most searches at Storyteller.net in the last 30 days? In order, Michael D McCarty, Jim Woodard, Linda Goodman, James Nelson-Lucas (as Patchwork Players) and Priscilla Howe.

I thought I'd written a blog post about Storyteller.net, but looking back, I see I've only mentioned it. This site is another that ROCKS! Sean Buvala dreamed it up many years ago, even before Google. I think I joined back in about 1997 or 1998. What is it? Storyteller.net is the place to find storytellers' information, recorded stories, texts of stories to tell, interviews with storytellers, articles on the artform, and tons more information in one easily accessible place. Whew!

I wrote a few of those articles. The first one I submitted was the one on the tyranny of themes. I'm also in a bunch of the ampitheater recordings--the most memorable for me was when I called Sean from a stairwell at the National Storytelling Conference in San Diego in 1999 to report on how the conference was going. That might even have been from a pay phone!

I've been recommending to storytellers for years that they have a page on this site. I want to make this an even stronger recommendation, especially for the Premium Pages (and no, I get no kickback from recommending this). Yeah, yeah, you might be saying, "But I have my own website. Why would I want to have another over there?"

Here's one reason: I've been booked and have sold recordings from my storyteller.net page even though I have a pretty nice site of my own. The more places I put my name on the web, the more likely it is that people looking for my kind of storytelling will find me, especially on a site that is dedicated to storytelling. It works even better if I keep that page updated (I'm saying this as a prod to get myself to do just that). Premium pages allow me to have audio and video, while a basic page is just that, basic information. My page also includes a link to my main website.

That has been enough of a reason for me to have Premium Page. There's another, one that Sean has just offered: Premium Pages give you exclusive access to videos and other information about the business of storytelling. I just watched the January video today. Sean always provides useful info about the nuts and bolts of what we do--this video is no exception. I'm looking forward to the February video.

So if you're a storyteller and you don't have a page on storyteller.net, why not?

P.S. Sean says he's working on a facelift for the site.