Creating an Author Website
Why and How
Today’s Shelf Life is on making a website for yourself, an author. An author website, if you will, which is a special kind of website only authors have. Okay, this isn’t true. It’s a normal website it just has some author-type stuff on it. Do not go look at mine when you’re done reading this article because mine doesn’t meet any of the qualifications. It hasn’t been updated in quite awhile because I have not had the time, energy, or motivation.
You might be thinking: “I’m not a web designer, I’m an author” (excepting my web-designer friends out there who are also authors) “I’m not going to make my own website, I don’t know how.” Fair. Most of us out here are not web designers and don’t know how. The good news is, you don’t have to be a web designer or know how to make a site. A simple site is very achievable by anyone thanks to the DIY website building tools that are out there for your use.
An author website does a lot of things for you.
Provides readers with a little information about the person who writes the books they enjoy.
Gives readers and other interested parties a method to contact you.
Showcases your bibliography, encouraging readers to read more of your books.
Space for your press kit and awards eligibility.
You can also use it to make sure everyone knows you have a cool dog (an important purpose for any website).
As an author, and especially if you are unagented or self-published, having a way for people to find you is important. Your local independent bookshop is not going to look you up in the phone book to call and ask you to come to an author event. The phone book doesn’t exist anymore. My friends’ kids don’t even have one to sit on at the dining room table. It’s also a helpful promotional tool to get people interested in buying your books. If you really want to get fancy, you can even open a shop—although that’s beyond the scope of today’s Shelf Life. Anything is possible on the internet.
Do you need an author website to be an author? No you do not. Having a website is not a requirement. There are downsides to maintaining a website, chiefly that you have to maintain it (ugh) and, also, there will be fees for web hosting that come due on a regular basis (I think mine are every year). That said, if you’re interested in creating one but you’re just not sure how to go about it, Shelf Life is here for you with the information you need.
Develop Your Content
This is the part that will probably come naturally to you, a writer—figuring out what content you’re going to include on your website. You will need to create text and choose images for at least the following three pages:
A homepage—this is the page web browsers land on when they navigate to your site. The foyer of your website, if you will.
An “About Me”/“Author Bio” page—this page tells users about you and may include your author bio, photos of you, photos of your pets, or anything else about you that you want readers to know.
A “Contact” page—this page gives instructions to the user on how to get in touch with you.
Let’s talk a little bit about these three pages and then move on to some additional pages you may wish to include on your site.
The homepage is where users land when they arrive at your top-level domain—for instance, www.YourWebsiteName.com. Like the entryway to your home, this is the first thing visitors see when they arrive and you want to make sure this area gives the best possible impression: That it’s welcoming, that it confirms for visitors that they’re in the right place, and that it stylistically matches your “brand” as a writer.
Check out the homepage of Stephen King. There’s no question that you’re in the right place, his mug is right there as are pictures of his latest books. His homepage (as of today) features a “carousel” with three slides—one advertising his new book, one advertising an YouTube event to promote his new book, and one promoting another new release. (He’s prolific.) As you scroll down his homepage, you also get a column with the latest Stephen King news, an opportunity to sign up for his newsletter, and a number of links at the bottom of the page to other pages on his site including his “The Author” page and a page with contact information. You can see similar examples of author websites that follow this popular setup at https://www.leighbardugo.com/ and https://jgrisham.com/.
Your about the author page can contain as much or as little detail as you wish, but should include your author bio as you are comfortable with it being reprinted elsewhere and a publicity photo of yourself. When someone writes about you and your work, whether it’s a kid doing a book report for school or a newspaper writing an article about you, they’re going to come straight to this page to pick up your bio and photo for their use. This is what the photo of you on your website is for. If you include a photo credit—that is, a credit for the photographer who took the photo—that photo credit should be picked up and reprinted by anyone who uses your publicity photo. Make sure you credit your photographer!
Your contact page need not give out any information that allows people to contact you directly. Website platforms will all have the capacity to create a form that users can fill to contact you by email without actually giving them your email address. There is no need to put your personal email address on your website for people to find. If you would prefer to include an email address rather than an entry form—some authors do!—consider getting a new email address for this express purpose rather than using your personal email, so you don’t get your author business all mixed in with your other business.
Another page that your site’s visitors might find helpful is a bibliography of your work with links to where they can purchase that work or read it online. If you visit Nora Roberts’s site, she has page dedicated to her full bibliography, with each book linked to a unique page about that book in particular: https://noraroberts.com/list-of-books/. You can see she does not link to anywhere you can purchase the books, but it’s not like her books are hard to find. If you check out Michael Crighton’s website, you’ll see each book’s individual page (for example, The Terminal Man) includes links to purchase the book at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, IndieBound, Apple, or Audible. The site also helpfully includes some excerpts from the book.
You may also want to include an awards eligibility page, especially if you are a published short fiction writer. This is a page on your site that lists all of the work you have published in the past year that is eligible for this year’s awards. These pages usually go up during award-nomination season and then come down again when the season ends, but Uncanny Magazine has their 2023 awards eligibility up still so, while this isn’t an author website exactly, you can get a sense of what this page is for. It’s to let Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and other award voters know which of your works are eligible for what awards based on eligibility criteria, so they can vote for you if they wish.
Those certainly aren’t all the pages you can create for your author website—the sky’s the limit—but those are some of the main ones you should consider creating to serve the audience who will be visiting your site—readers who want to read more, and, hopefully, journalists who want to write about you.
Choose Your Domain and Host
The domain is the name and address of your website, for instance www.catherineforrest.com is mine. I own this domain for a set term of time after which I have the opportunity to renew. If I ever choose not to renew, then catherineforrest.com reverts back to an available domain name that anyone can purchase. Domain names are secured on a first come, first served basis. If someone else already has your name as a website domain, you can either try to buy it from them (not covered in this article) or you can come up with a different domain name.
If you find your name is already taken, try combinations like AuthorYourName, YourNameAuthor, or YourNameBooks. There’s definitely an appropriate domain name out there that you can get if you’re creative, which you are, because you’re an author.
There are many web hosts that will act as a one-stop shop for you. They will:
Register your domain
Host your site
Help you build your site (via their provided toolset)
Services like these include:
I threw SquareSpace in there to show you that not all web hosts start with the letter W.
The web hosting services I listed above all offer the suite of tools that a layperson needs to create a successful website. They’ll register your domain for you, they provide templated and WYSIWYG tools for building the site, they’ll host it for you, and they’ll report to you on traffic and access if you care to look at those metrics. The costs may be itemized so that you can pay for your domain and your hosting separately, or they might be bundled together as one cost. Note that if you already own a domain name and you wish to transfer it to one of these sites for hosting, they will be happy to help you with that. You don’t have to buy a domain from them if you don’t want to.
Another note: Most of these hosts, if not all of them, will provide you with an email address @ your domain as part of the package, for instance, info@catherineforrest.com. That could be used on your contact page to avoid giving out your personal email address that you use for everyday stuff—just remember to actually check the inbox!
Once you’ve selected your host, paid up, and connected your domain, it’s time to start building using the suite of website-building tools provided by the host. This sounds intimidating but these toolkits mostly use drag-and-drop building blocks that you can place and then fill with your carefully developed content. Once you have everything laid out the way you want, you can preview the site and then publish it. Fortunately, publishing a website is not like publishing a book in that if you need to make a change later it’s as easy as navigating to your site’s host, logging in, and using the toolkit to make edits.
If you’ve wanted an author website but been intimidated to create one yourself, I encourage you to fool around with the free offerings on Wix, WordPress, or their kindred. The free sites are not as professional-looking as the site you pay for—they won’t have a unique domain and they’ll have the host’s branding on them—but they can give you a feel for how easy it is to build a site before you commit.
If you have a great author website or know a great author website, drop it in the comments so we can all check it out!
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.