Christina Kaye
Your author website is the place where your ideal readers can find you, learn about you, and buy your books, so let's make sure it's set up for maximum success!
Your website is the cornerstone of your author brand and a powerful tool for connecting with readers, showcasing your work, and growing your audience.
Eventually, it will be the central hub from where you sell your amazing books and keep a larger portion of your book sales in your pocket.
Whether you’re a first-time author or an experienced writer, having a professional, well-designed website can set you apart in today’s competitive publishing landscape.
In this post, we’ll explore the essential elements of a compelling author website and share tips to ensure your site not only looks great but also works hard for your author career.
Table of Contents
Choosing Your Domain Name
The first step to building an author website that attracts your target audience of readers and gives you a platform to showcase your work is deciding on and buying your domain name.
This seems simple, and it is, but a mistake many new authors make is just using their author name or penname as their website domain.
Instead, you need to make sure you include at least one keyword in your domain name, such as “author” or “books.”
Here are some examples using my name to show you what I mean.
Once you have decided on the domain name you want, head on over to SquareSpace and enter your desired domain name in the search bar.
If the domain you want is available, it will show that it’s available as a dot com name, which is what you want, not dot net or dot org.
Reserve your domain name and go through the steps Squarespace walks you through to set up your account.
After setting up your dashboard in Sqaurespace, be sure you go ahead and reserve a domain specific email so your email address is something like hello@christinakayeauthor.com not christinakayeauthor@gmail.com.” This will be important for setting up your email marketing funnel.
Choosing Your Platforms
Next up, you’ll need to decide which platform you want to use to build your website.
There are numerous different options, including Wix, Showit, and WordPress.
Each platform has different benefits and drawbacks, but after tons of research and trial and error, I believe your best option is to use WordPress.org.
And depending on which option you choose, you would normally then have to choose a website hosting platform.
But I’ve made it super simple for you!
I’ve partnered with the amazing folks at A2Hosting.com, a service I’ve personally used for over 4 years now.
And if you click THIS LINK, you can not only try A2Hosting for yourself and get the benefit of their super helpful support team, but you can also get their help setting up your website on WordPress!
Structuring Your Site
With all the logistics now out of the way, you need to now make sure you start with the most important four pages you’ll need to kickstart your site and build a home for you to introduce yourself to readers and show off your books.
Home Page
The first, most obvious page you need is your home page.
This needs to function as a “welcome mat” for your readers who land on your website.
You should start at the top with a warm, welcoming message from you, inviting your readers into your world and giving them a compelling reason to stick around and peruse your site.
Before you have books to sell, and maybe even after that, you should add a picture of yourself, like a headshot, on the home page next to the welcome message.
Remember, while the goal of your website is eventually going to be selling your books directly from it to earn more money from each book sale, the site is about YOU, not just your books, and it should function as a place where your readers can learn more about you and get comfortable with you as an author.
About Me
The next page on your nav bar needs to be “About Me.”
This is the best place for you to showcase your personality and stand out from the herd of other writers in your genre.
Include your compelling, first-person POV bio next to another picture of you, this one, showing more personality and/or the kind of writer you are.
I also encourage my clients to add a “Fun Facts” section below the bio and headshot.
This will go miles toward making you stand out as an individual, unique, and relatable author readers can really get to know, and eventually, trust, which is the foundation of growing your reader fanbase!
My Book
The third page on your nav bar should be “My Book” or “My Books,” depending on your preference.
If you’re building your site while you are writing your first book, and it’s part of a series, you can go ahead and use the plural form of “book.”
On one side of the page, include your book blurb/book description (the same summary you will put on the back of your book and on the Amazon listing page).
Next to the blurb, you should add a 3D mockup of a temporary cover for your book, which you can create in Canva quickly and easily because you do not want to add your final cover to the website until after your official cover reveal online event (two weeks prior to your launch).
There’s a really awesome online tool that helps you create 3D mockups of your book covers in all formats, among other things, which you can FIND HERE.
Contact Me
Lastly, you need a “Contact Me” page, which is where your readers should be told to feel welcome contacting you.
Start at the top with a short message, telling readers something like, “If you want to talk about romantic fantasy books, have any questions, or want to know about my upcoming release, feel free to contact me!”
Then, you should include your author email and/or a static contact form for them to submit through your website.
Under all that, I highly recommend you have another statement that says, “Before you go!’ and then, under that, invite your readers to follow you on your social media platforms.
But be sure to use icons for each platform that are clickable and will redirect them to your profiles on each one as this will make it far more likely for them to follow through and actually follow you!
Designing Your Website
Now that you have the structure of your website and the main pages you need, it’s time to put the final design elements on your site.
How you design your website is completely up to you, but keep in mind that everything you ever put out online needs to be “on-brand,” meaning, use only your chosen brand colors and fonts.
Make sure every word on your website is visible and easy to read, so for example, don’t put a color font over a color background just because they’re your brand colors.
The best way to make sure your site POPS and is easy to read is to use white or very light shades of your brand color in the background with black 18 point sans serif font overlaying it.
A lot of authors like to use scenescapes in the background, especially fantasy authors, and that’s fine, as long as your copy is legible and easy to read.
Also, it’s important that everything you write on your website is written in first person POV, rather than third because this will make you much more relatable and easier to connect with, whereas third person makes you seem stuffy and kind of diva.
Lastly, the longer and more complex your website content is, the less likely readers will stay on your website long enough to help with SEO and site indexing.
So, remember to KISS (keep it simple stupid), make all written portions of your site short and concise, and try to keep as much as possible “above the fold” which is an old newspaper term that basically means that, without scrolling, the important details should be right there on the page.
In Conclusion...
This article is a simple “how to get started” tutorial for authors, but if you would like a more detailed, step-by-step walkthrough of every important step, I highly recommend you check out my mini course on building your author website!
You can find it by CLICKING HERE!
It’s only $57 and you can use Klarna or Afterpay at check out to divide that already affordable registration fee into 4 smaller payments.
Lastly, helping you build your author website as the foundation of growing your reader fanbase, so you can successfully launch your book and your career is just part of what I’ll help you achieve as my client.
So, if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you just as I have over 150 authors and counting, CLICK HERE to set up your FREE consultation as soon as today!
