The author website, reduced to what it needs
An author website usually fails in one of two directions. Either it never exists, and a reader who finished your book and wanted more has nowhere to go. Or it becomes a project: themes, plugins, a blog, a shop, three weeks of evenings, and a book that still is not finished.
The useful version is small. A site exists so that a reader who liked the book can find you, join your list, and buy the next one. Everything past those three jobs is optional, and most of it is optional forever.
The pages that earn their place
Five. That is the whole site, and four of them are short.
A home page that says who you are and shows the books. Your name, one or two sentences about what you write, and the covers. A reader who arrived from the back of a paperback wants to confirm they are in the right place and see what else there is. That is a ten-second job, and a home page that makes it take longer is working against you.
A page per book. The cover, the blurb, and buy links. This is the page that does the actual selling, and it is the one most author sites get thinnest. Give each title its own page with its own address, so you have something to link to from a newsletter, a post, an ad, or the back of another book.
A newsletter sign-up with a reason attached. Put it on the home page and at the bottom of every book page. A form that says "sign up for updates" collects very few addresses; a form that offers something specific collects many more. That is a topic of its own — see the companion guide below.
A short about page with a usable photo. Three or four paragraphs, written in whichever person you can stand to write in, plus a photograph a reviewer or a bookshop could actually print. "Usable" means reasonably sharp, reasonably recent, and available at a decent size — not a cropped square from a group shot.
A contact route. An email address or a form. Readers write to authors, and so do reviewers, book clubs, librarians and the occasional local newspaper. If there is no way to reach you, those messages simply do not happen.
What to skip until you need it
A blog. Not because blogs are bad, but because an abandoned one is worse than none. A front page whose most recent post is from two years ago tells a visitor the author stopped. If you want to write regularly to readers, write to your newsletter instead — the people there asked for it, and nobody sees the gap between issues.
A shop. Selling and shipping your own copies means inventory, payment handling, packaging, postage and customer service. Stores do all of that badly but for free. Direct sales are a real business decision, not a website feature, and they belong well after launch.
A forum, a members' area, a reading community. These need a crowd to work, and an empty one is visibly empty.
Elaborate design. Custom animation, video backgrounds, a splash page before the actual site. None of it sells a book, all of it slows the page down, and a slow page loses readers on a phone before anything renders.
In the tools. Mockups render your book as a physical object for a home page or a book page, and the Social Pack produces stills and a short vertical video from the same cover — so the images your site needs come out of the design you already made. Start a book → · about the tools
The decisions that matter more than the design
Use your own domain. A platform subdomain is free and it belongs to the platform. Platforms get sold, change their terms, shut down, or decide your plan needs upgrading. A domain you registered is an address you keep — you can move the site underneath it and every link ever printed still works. Your name, or your name plus the word "books" or "author" if it is taken. This is the one part of a website worth paying for on day one.
Link to every store you are on, not just one. Whichever retailer you send everyone to, some of your readers do not shop there. They read on a different device, live in a country where that store is weak, or borrow from a library. A book page that lists every place the book exists — each edition, each format — converts readers you would otherwise lose at the last step. If you are exclusive to one store, that is a different situation; see Going wide, or staying exclusive.
Keep the book page current. New format, new edition, a hardcover added six months later, a corrected file, a large print version — each of those needs the page updated, and each is also a reason to send a short note to your list. Sites go stale quietly: a paperback link that outlived the ebook, a "coming soon" from last year.
Use the same cover image everywhere. The image on your site, in your newsletter, on the store listing, in your social posts and on the back of the previous book should be one file. A reader who saw your cover twice and recognizes it the third time is the entire mechanism by which a small marketing effort compounds. Two slightly different versions — an old subtitle, a different color treatment — break that, and you get none of the benefit of either.
Check it on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one. Look at the cover at the size it actually displays, tap the buy links, and try the sign-up form with your thumb.
That is the site. An afternoon, not a month, and it does the three things a reader needs it to do.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The newsletter, and what to give people for joining · More: Mockups: showing a book that does not exist yet · How to write a blurb that sells the book · The back of the book is where your next sale is