An author website doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to do a few things well: help readers find your books, learn who you are, join your email list, and know where to go next. For a self-published author, that makes your website more than an online bio.
Instagram can change its algorithm. Amazon can change how your book appears. A social platform you spent three years building on can suddenly become much less useful. But your website is yours. Social media is useful for discovering and talking to readers, but it’s rented space. Your website can give your readers somewhere permanent to find you.
Why an author website still matters
Think of an author website as the home base for your career as a writer. Your books, newsletter, appearances, reviews, interviews, bonus material, and contact information can all live there without competing with someone else’s feed.
When venturing to create your own author website, there are three things worth getting right from the beginning.
1. Channel your marketing to your website
If someone discovers you through Instagram, a podcast interview, an Amazon ad, or a guest post, where should they go next? Ideally, somewhere you control. Connect your website with the rest of your marketing rather than making it exist as an isolated channel. Once a mildly interested reader or viewer comes across your website, they could:
- Know more about your latest book
- Buy your work from preferred retailers
- Discover the first book in your series
- Join your email list
- Download a bonus chapter, and a lot more…
2. Align your website with the theme of your books
Your website doesn’t need elaborate “branding.” But it does need to feel consistent with what you write. If you publish dark psychological thrillers, a site filled with pastel illustrations and playful handwritten fonts may send the wrong signal. If you write cozy romances, a stark black-and-red website designed like a crime dossier probably isn’t helping either.
When picking a theme for your website, start with what readers already see on your books. Your covers will often give you a useful direction for colors, typography, photography or illustration, tone, and overall mood. Consistency helps readers recognize that they have landed in the right place.
3. Decide what you want your readers to do
Before choosing a template or debating fonts, ask one simpler question: What is the most useful thing a reader can do when they arrive here?
Your answer might be:
- buy your latest book
- start with Book One
- join your newsletter
- book you for a speaking engagement
- download a reader magnet
- find your next event
You can have more than one goal, of course, but one or two should clearly matter more than the others. Because if everything is important, then nothing is important!
If newsletter growth is your priority, don’t bury the signup form in the footer. If you want people to start a six-book fantasy series, give them an obvious Start the series button rather than making them work out the reading order themselves.
Author website essentials
There are plenty of elements that can go into your author platform, but you probably don’t need all of them on day one. The best approach is to start with pages that readers are most likely to need.
Your books and bio
Give every important book, or series, a proper home on your website. A useful book page might include the cover, a short hook, the book description, retailer links, available formats, selected reviews or endorsements, series order where relevant, and bonus material or content warnings if applicable. If you have a series, make the reading order painfully obvious. Readers should not need to open Amazon reviews to figure out whether The Last Winter is Book One or Book Four.
Your author bio doesn’t need to tell readers everything that has happened to you since kindergarten. Instead, present them with the version that matters here: what you write, what makes your work interesting, and enough about you to make the person behind the books feel real.
A professional headshot also helps, particularly if you want interviews, speaking opportunities, festival appearances, or media coverage.
Contact information and email signup
Make it easy for the right people to reach you. A simple contact form may be enough. If you regularly receive media, rights, speaking, or event inquiries, you can also explain what types of inquiries you welcome. Although linking to your social profile on this page is a good idea, it should not be the only way to contact you. Always include your business email and contact number if applicable.
For many self-published authors, an email signup may be one of the most valuable parts of the site. An email list gives you direct access to readers who have actively asked to hear from you. That way, when your next book launches, you aren’t entirely dependent on Instagram showing your post to 7 percent of your followers.
To encourage your reader to subscribe, provide them with something relevant and useful:
- a bonus short story
- a prequel
- a deleted scene
- an extra chapter
- a character guide
- occasional news about upcoming books
“Subscribe to my newsletter” works. “Get the prequel free” gives readers a much clearer reason to click.
Beyond the essentials
Once the essential pages are covered, you can add content that gives readers a reason to stay or return.
Blog posts
The best blog topics depend heavily on what you write. A historical novelist might write about an unusual piece of research that shaped a scene. A nonfiction author might answer questions readers regularly ask about their subject. A fantasy author could publish reading guides, maps, or background material from the world of the series. But what you probably don’t need is 600 words on “My Top Five Writing Tips” simply because you need to fill your website with blogs!
Reader magnets
A reader magnet is free content offered in exchange for an email signup. For fiction, that might be a prequel, bonus scene, short story, or novella. For nonfiction, it could be a checklist, workbook, reference sheet, or useful companion resource. The closer it is to the reason someone would buy your book, the better.
Frequently asked questions
An FAQ is worthwhile after you’ve published a series of books and started building a reader community around your work. You could cover things such as:
- What order should I read the series in?
- Will there be another book?
- Are signed copies available?
- Can book clubs contact you?
- Do you make school or library visits?
- Where can I find audiobook editions?
Behind-the-scenes material
Some readers genuinely enjoy seeing how a book came together. Research photographs, location notes, rejected cover concepts, playlists, maps, historical sources, or the story behind a character can all work.
Getting started with your author website – The Tech side of it
You do not need to become a web developer to build a good author website. Your choice of hosting platform, themes, and template mostly comes down to how much control you want and how much tinkering you’re willing to tolerate.
Choosing a platform: WordPress vs Squarespace vs Wix
WordPress offers a lot of flexibility. You can choose from thousands of themes and plugins and customize almost every part of the site. But that flexibility comes with some responsibility. Depending on how your site is hosted, you may need to think about updates, plugins, backups, security, and performance.
WordPress (wordpress.org) is a good fit if you expect the site to grow or want considerable control over how it works.
Both Squarespace and Wix make it relatively easy to build a polished site without doing much technical work. Hosting, templates, editing tools, and many basic features are bundled together, which can be appealing if you would rather spend Saturday writing your next chapter than troubleshooting a WordPress plugin. The trade-off is less flexibility in some areas. And for many authors, that’s perfectly fine.
For new authors looking for a balance between ease of use and control, a hosted WordPress solution (through a hosting provider) or Squarespace/Wix often provides a great starting point.
Using website templates without looking generic
Templates are useful because there’s unfortunately no prize for building every page from scratch. I learned this the hard way when building my own website.
A good template gives you the structure and lets you concentrate on the parts readers will notice. You can usually personalize it by changing the fonts, colors, imagery, page order, and calls to action. The quickest way to make a template look less generic is to modify these critical elements so that they align with your book’s theme. Make sure that your finished website homepage doesn’t still have that stock photograph of someone typing beside a latte!
Helping readers find your website
SEO can get technical very quickly. An author website rarely needs to begin there. At its simplest, SEO for your author website means helping Google understand your pages and helping the right people find them. Google’s own SEO guidance makes the same basic point: build useful content for users and make it easy for search engines to understand and discover.
There isn’t a secret trick that automatically puts a site first. But there are a few things you could do to make your author website more discoverable on Google or ChatGPT/Gemini.
- Use the words readers actually search for
If you write historical mysteries set in Victorian London, phrases such as “Victorian mystery,” “historical crime fiction,” or “Victorian detective novel” can help Google understand what your book is about. In SEO, these are usually called keywords. The key is to use them naturally and give Google enough context to understand the page. For example, instead of repeating “Victorian mystery” several times, you might describe your book as a Victorian mystery set in 1890s London, featuring an amateur detective and a locked-room murder. That gives both readers and search engines a clearer picture of what the book offers.
- Write useful page titles
Each important page should have a clear title that describes what is there. For example, “The Ashcroft Murders | A Victorian mystery by Jane Smith” is considerably more informative than “Book One | Jane Smith.”
Google specifically recommends clear, concise titles that accurately describe the page.
- Write meta descriptions for important pages
A meta description gives you an opportunity to summarize a page for someone seeing it in search results. Keep it specific rather than stuffing it with keywords. One important wrinkle: Google doesn’t guarantee that it will display the meta description you wrote. It often creates a snippet from the page itself when that better matches the search.
So write a good description, but don’t spend three hours agonizing over whether it contains exactly 155 characters.
- Describe your images
Alt text is primarily a description. Google recommends short, descriptive alt text that explains the image in context. Alt text explains an image to people using screen readers and can also help search engines understand the image in context. For a book cover, something simple might work: Cover of The Ashcroft Murders by Jane Smith. Not “Best historical mystery Victorian books crime author novel buy book.”
- Link related pages together
If a blog post discusses the research behind your new novel, link to the book. If Book Three belongs to a series, link readers to Books One and Two. If your About page mentions speaking engagements, link to your Events or Contact page. These links help readers move around your site and help search engines discover and understand related pages.
Protecting and backing up your author website
This is the boring part right up until the day you need it. Use strong, unique passwords and enable multifactor authentication when your platform supports it. Keep your website software and plugins updated, particularly if you use WordPress. And make sure you have backups.
Ideally, the backup should live somewhere other than the server hosting the website. If the whole account fails or is compromised, a backup stored inside the same account may not be much consolation.
5 ways to make your author website reader-friendly
Good web design is often less about adding things and more about removing the things getting in your reader’s way. A few basics matter more than almost everything else.
1. Making it work on a phone
Open your website on your phone and actually use it. Can you read the book description without zooming? Are the buttons easy to tap? Does the menu work? Does your signup form fit the screen? Does a giant image push your latest book halfway down the page? These nuances matter for readers, and Google also uses the mobile version of your site for indexing.
2. Keep navigation boring in the best possible way
Your menu is probably not the best place to host your creativity. Simple labels such as these work because everyone understands them:
- Books
- About
- Blog
- Contact
Calling your Books page “Enter My Worlds” may sound atmospheric. It also makes your visitor stop and figure out what you mean. So, it’s best to save your creativity for your books.
3. Use your best visuals
Your book covers should look sharp. Your headshot shouldn’t be a blurry crop from someone’s wedding. Images should be large enough to look good without being so enormous that the page takes forever to load. And give your pages some breathing room to make it easier on the reader.
4. Make the text easy to read
A beautiful font is not much use if readers struggle through three paragraphs of it. Aim for readable type, strong contrast, comfortable line spacing, and paragraphs that don’t feel oversized on a phone. For example, light gray text on a white background may look elegant but can be tiring to read. So can decorative script fonts used for body copy or tightly packed paragraphs that turn into a wall of text on smaller screens.
For longer sections, use clear subheadings to help readers find their place, and switch to a short list when several points are easier to scan that way.
5. Guide your readers on what to do next
Good calls to action are specific.
Good calls to action are specific. Instead of using a vague Learn More button, tell readers exactly what they can do next, whether that’s: buying the book, starting with Book One, reading a sample, joining your newsletter, getting a free prequel, or checking upcoming events.
- Buy the book
- Start with Book One
- Read a sample
- Join my newsletter
- Get the free prequel
- View upcoming events
The clearer the action, the easier it is for readers to decide whether they want to take it.
A good author website doesn’t need dozens of pages, complicated SEO, or a fully custom design. For first-time authors, it’s best to start with the essentials, give your books proper pages, tell readers who you are, and make it easy to join your email list and easy to buy the book. In addition, make sure everything works on a phone.
At Falcon Edits, we can help you in this arduous journey of putting together your author website by polishing the words that go into it. We copyedit website copy, blog posts, book descriptions, and other marketing materials so they read clearly, naturally, and professionally without losing your voice.
👉 Get a Free Editing Sample. See what professional editing can do for your blog posts.
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