Is An Author Website Necessary?
Is An Author Website Necessary?
Author website
Any author planning a career as a writer will be faced with the question – should they have an author website? The answer to this question depends on how serious they are about having a career as an author.
If planning a career as an author and wanting to publish books then clearly the answer is “Yes.” An author does need to have an author’s website or blog.
Why have an author’s website?
An author website is fundamental to establishing an author platform. It’s from here that you tell your story and communicate to your followers information about you and your books.
From your website or blog, you will project your brand. Basically, this means the way you will present yourself and how your followers will perceive you.
Your author platform will lie at the heart of everything you do as an author and will be central to your marketing strategy. It’s a hub – your hub.
You the author are at the centre of your hub and your hub is like a wheel from which all things radiate.
Having an author website, then, is the starting point for building your author platform. From the website, you will communicate information about yourself, your images, books, reviews and testimonials, and sales pages.
The website will become your hub. From here you will communicate with your target audience promoting your book/s, selling your books, and advancing your career.
You the author will own and control it. The website is your vehicle where you will have all information about you and your books, the links to your books, perhaps even a shopping cart, and there will be a lead magnet to attract followers who will become part of your database.
You can create valuable content in the form of blog posts that are disseminated to your subscribers, and these blog posts will get indexed and ranked on search engines like Google.
You will be seen as an authority in your field of expertise.
From the links in the social media icons on your website, you’ll be able to connect to your various social media platforms allowing for an even wider distribution of your valuable content.
In addition, if you so wish, you may want to monetize your website with affiliate links to generate extra income.
How should you structure an author’s website?
An author’s website will be structured with various pages. There will be a
- Home page
- About page
- Contact page
- Promote your books page
- Blog page
- Legal pages such as the Terms & Conditions and Privacy pages
- Lead magnet
- Links to social media
When starting out just build a basic website. Don’t have all the bells and whistles or anything too high tech or fancy. Regard your website as a work in progress. Start simple and as you grow and develop as an author so too will your website grow and develop.
WordPress website
There are many other website platforms available but WordPress is recognised as the best and easiest platform to use.
And when I refer to WordPress I mean WordPress.org which is the most popular and the number one platform in the world. WordPress has two platforms (1) wordpress.org, and (2) wordpress.com.
With WordPress.org you own and control it. This will allay any danger of losing your site just because someone else decides that it is against their terms of service. With wordpress.org you can choose your own hosting, you can customise it by choosing powerful themes and plugins, and if you want to you can monetise the website.
Learning curve
If all this is new to you there will be at first a steep learning curve but despite this, you can easily learn to build a website yourself and manage it yourself.
Start out by learning the basics, build a simple website, and get it up and running. That’s all you have to do.
I did, and I’m not a techie type person.
How do you start?
- If money is no issue you can hire a web developer which means you’ll be investing anywhere from $500 to thousands of dollars.
- You can hire a low budget web developer on Fiverr
- If you are the techie type you can DIY
- If you want to learn yourself enroll in a course
- Find a mentor who can guide you
If you’d like to learn more about what is involved in building an author website, how to establish an author platform, how to outsource, ways to market your book, and in fact, if you want to learn every aspect of the self-publishing journey then consider joining the monthly subscription program How To Become a Self-Published Author.
ACCESS HERE the How To Become A Self-Published Author program.
Author and coach