It took years, but I finally swooped up the domain for my author website! And now that it’s up and running, I’ve pulled together this post that describes what an author website is and some guidance for how to get and make one!
Here’s my new author website! Check it out: RebeccaMcLaughlin.com
What is an Author Website?
An Author Website is like any other kind of website for a business. Like any good website, three things should be abundantly clear:
- What is the business?
- What is being sold?
- How to interact/purchase/learn more/etc.
For an Author website, the answers to these question are pretty straightforward:
- You, the author, are the business
- Your books (and any other related services, like author visits, events, other services you sell)
- How to learn more about the books, how to purchase the books
In short: The business is you and the product is your books.
Things You Should Know
Getting your very own website typically involves two main purchases:
- Domain Name
- Web Hosting and Site Design
Depending on which platform you use for web hosting, you may get a year or so of a free domain. There are a lot of site builders and hosting platform out there (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, GoDaddy, to name a few), so you’ll want to shop around and see what prices and packages work for you. Most of these allow you as the site owner to use drag-drop interfaces to design the site, though you could consider tacking on a third cost of Site Design if you want to hire a person or company to do that work for you.
Domain Name
What is a domain? A domain is the web address, essentially, as well as the server and location that the website itself is stored. Often, you can have the domain purchased through any number of domain services (GoDaddy, BlueHost, along with most of the platforms for site builders and hosting.
A Good Domain Name for an Author Website
A good domain for an author is typically your author name (which might be your legal name or pen name, depending on which you publish under). If your name isn’t available, it’s not uncommon to append “author” or “writes” or “books” to the domain name. I waited literal years in the eaves for my full name to become available as a domain, but if it wasn’t available, here’s some options I may have considered:
- rebeccamclaughlinwrites
- rebeccamclaughlinbooks
- rebeccamclaughlinauthor
Site Design
Site Pages
You want three core things in an author website (the links below are to the corresponding pages on my site, if you want an example of what it can look like):
- A Home page with recent news or highlights for your most recent book or product.
- An About page with details about you as an author (your author bio, typically), along with any other desired additional details. You can include contact information here or on a separate contact page.
- A Books page with information about your books. It is also a good idea to have one page PER book, and the menu for the books on your site’s global navigation should have a dropdown menu that navigates to each book or series.
Optional pages:
- Contact page, for dedicated contact information, on which you could put a contact form, contact details, and any other social media or landing locations for you as an author on the internet.
- Blog, which could either link to an external blog or a blog managed on the site.
General Site Design Guidance
Here are some general tips for making a website in general:
Image and Visuals — You don’t want to inundate your site with images, but you definitely need them! There’s an abundance of free stock imagery out there that is bookish or authorial, but the best images are the ones that are of you and your books!
Keep it Simple — You want a good balance of empty space, small chunks of text, and images. It can be tempting once you have a site to fill it with all the good stuff you want to put on it, but you don’t want to scare visitors off with too much stuff going on.
Rebecca McLaughlin 