The Domain Name

For years I've had my own domain name: frap.org. Frap has languished in the 1990s style-wise and I'm going to redo it in WordPress eventually, but frap is a dog-related website and was never intended as an author site, so it's time to buy the vanity website which I always avoided. ellenclary.com has been available for a long time, so I wasn't terribly worried about it. Until.... Eek! Someone now owns it. I should have bought it years ago (kick self).

So I grabbed ellenclary.org just to "park" it while I decided what to do.
I did some checking and someone in Korea owns ellenclary.com. Did some Irish person move to Korea? I have no idea.

Later one I also parked ellenclarywrites.com since that's the business name.

If I give the domain registrar $69, they will reach out to the owner to try to negotiate a price. I decide to think about it. (There are a lot of domain name registrars so mine isn't any more useful that anyone else's.)

Two to three weeks pass, and I'm talking with my sales person at the domain name registrar asking about the soon to be available .author extension. He told me that generally the new domain extensions are more money though it would be clear that it's an author website. That said, everyone automatically assumes .com.

I think some more. One thing I am new at is thinking in terms of what is a business expense. Because of my family, I do have some funding (not a ton, but some) for my writing business and things having to do with my author website are clearly business expenses. Suddenly, the $69 doesn't seem as large as it once was. I tell the sales guy to go ahead and start the domain broker process to negotiate for ellenclary.com.

All the $69 does is pay the broker to go start a conversation with the owner. The owner could very easily say no, though the domain is not "doing" anything right now. It's not a website. Actually buying the domain name could be expensive, but it's not like ellenclary.com is a hot business catch phrase, so it can't be that much money. It's up to my registrar to negotiate for as low a price as possible though it is fair to think this could easily be a few hundred dollars. I highly doubt it will be in the thousands.

After a few days, the broker asked me to set a start and max bids for ellenclary.com. Of course, I wanted a min bid of $1, but I didn't want to insult them, so I chose a starting bid of $10. The maximum bid I set at $200. 

I will update this as things proceed.