Getting Started with an Author Website

One of the most crucial tools in your book selling arsenal (and beyond) is a professional author website.

It's more than just an online portfolio; it's the central hub of your author brand, a place to connect with readers, and a powerful engine for book sales and long-term success.

Why Do You Need an Author Website?

In the digital age, an author website is non-negotiable. Here's why it's essential:

Building Your Author Brand: Your website is the digital embodiment of your author brand. It's where you showcase your unique voice, genre, and personality. Having a dedicated space allows you to control how you're perceived by readers, creating a consistent and memorable image. This is especially important when you're rapidly releasing a book, as it gives readers a place to go to learn more about you and your work.
Lead Generation: Your website is a crucial tool for building your email list. By offering a freebie in exchange for signing up for your newsletter, you can collect contact information that allows you to directly reach out to interested readers with updates on new releases, promotions, and other exciting news. This is essential for building a long-term, sustainable author career.
Central Hub for Interviews & Press: When you start getting interest from podcasts, blogs, or other media outlets (or even just from meeting your readers), they'll want a central place to learn about you. Your website provides a professional and easy way to share your author bio, book details, and contact information. It can also feature a dedicated media kit, making it easy for journalists and bloggers to access everything they need. This can be crucial during the marketing push in your 30-day challenge.
Enhanced Discoverability: While social media is great for engagement, it's not ideal for long-term discoverability. Search engines like Google can index your website, meaning people can find you through search terms related to your genre or book titles. A well-optimized website can attract new readers who might not encounter you on social media alone.
Direct Sales Opportunities: While you'll likely be selling through retailers like Amazon or Kobo, your website can also offer direct sales. This allows you to keep a larger portion of the revenue and build a direct relationship with your readers. Offering exclusive content or discounts on your website can further incentivize readers to buy directly from you.

Essential Pages for Your Author Website

Do you know what you need to put on your author website?

Every site should include these foundational pages:

Homepage: Your homepage is the first impression for most visitors. It should clearly state who you are, what you write, and what you want the reader to do (sign up for your newsletter, check out your latest book, etc.). Include a large, eye-catching image or video, a short author bio, and a prominent call-to-action for joining your newsletter. During the Fiction in 30 challenge, highlight your current release prominently.
Book/Series Pages: Each book or series you write should have its own dedicated page. Include the cover image, a compelling synopsis, links to purchase from various retailers, and possibly excerpts or bonus content. If you have a series, make sure to present them in order.
About the Author Page: Readers want to connect with the person behind the stories. Share your author journey, your passions, and what inspires you. Include a professional author photo. This page is about creating a personal connection with your readers.
Contact Page: Make it easy for readers, media, and other authors to get in touch with you. Include a contact form or your email address.

Going the Extra Mile: Additional Pages to Consider

Once you have the essentials covered, consider adding these pages to enhance your website's functionality:

Direct Sales Page: If you decide to sell directly to your readers, create a dedicated page for this. Use a secure payment processor and clearly outline shipping policies and pricing. Consider offering ebook versions, signed paperback versions, or special bundles.
Blog/News Page: A blog allows you to share your thoughts, writing process, news about upcoming releases, and other content that engages your readers. It can also boost your website's search engine optimization (SEO). Even if you only have time for a short post once a week, it can be a valuable way to connect with readers. During the Fiction in 30 challenge, this can be a good place to share your progress.
PR Kit/Media Page: Make it easy for media professionals to find information about you and your books. Include high-resolution author photos, book cover images, press releases, and a downloadable author bio. This saves journalists time and makes it more likely they'll cover you.
Events Page: If you do book signings, virtual events, or other appearances, create an events page to keep your readers updated. Include dates, times, locations, and links to register.
Book Club Page: If you're trying to make your book a good fit for book clubs, you can create a page that provides discussion questions, information about the book, and maybe even a contact form for book clubs that want to reach out.

Relevant Apex Authors Trainings:

Website Hosting Options

Now that we know what to put on our website, we need to figure out how to get that website online where readers can visit it. There are far too many options to list them all here, but here are some options from the simplest and least effort to more flexibility but also more effort:

Author-Focused Sites: There are also platforms specifically designed for authors, such as Books2Read Author Pages, which provides a central page with links to your books on various retailers, or BookFunnel Universal Book Links, which lets you create universal links that take readers to their preferred retailer for your book. Both solutions let you create simple author-centric landing pages without having to spend any time coding.
Newsletter Services with Website Builders: Some newsletter services like MailerLite and Kit offer basic website building tools integrated with their email marketing platform. This is a great option for simplicity and beginners. You can easily manage your newsletter signups and build a simple, effective website. Best part? You probably already have a newsletter service that can handle this for you!
Page Builders: Platforms like Google, Wix, and Squarespace offer drag-and-drop website builders that are easy to use and require no coding knowledge. They provide beautiful templates and a variety of features, making it easy to create a professional-looking website quickly. Shopify fits in this category as well, if you are using them for your direct sales. If you think you can fit everything onto a reactive one-page website, you can even set one up through Canva for free (though if you want to point your own domain name at it, then you’ll need a Canva Pro account.)
Self-Hosting with a Content Management System: There are a number of CMS packages that can give you an easy interface for editing your website and that will manage everything for you, such as WordPress, Joomla, or Ghost. Our favorite is WordPress, because it is very flexible and offers a lot of customization options. There are two primary challenges with these, though. First, there are often so many themes or plugins to choose from that it can be overwhelming to decide what you need. And second, you need to have a separate web hosting account which is yet one more layer of what you need to learn how to manage.

Relevant Apex Authors Trainings:

How much will it cost for an author website?

Obviously, the sky is the limit when it comes to how much you can spend on an author website. Of course, most of us don’t have an unlimited budget, so here’s what you can expect that you’ll have to pay for…

There are four places where you can spend money (or not) for your author website:

Domain Name
Hosting
Software
Labor

Domain Name

First, there's your Domain Name. This is your website’s address; what people type into the browser to visit you.

Domain names cost between $9 and $50 per year, depending on the type of domain name and where you register it. For a domain ending in “.com” you should expect to spend $10-$13 per year.

I recommend Namecheap.com as they’ve always served me well, and you can probably get a deep discount off of your first year.

That said, we’ve since transferred all of our domains to CloudFlare because we own a lot of them and they resell domains at the wholesale price so that adds up to a good cost savings. You do need to be more technical to use them, however, so I generally wouldn’t recommend them to the average author.

Hosting

The actual website that your domain name points to has to be hosted somewhere, and that’s where your hosting expense comes in. There is obviously a lot of wiggle room here, ranging from absolutely free and no cost up to hundreds of dollars per month.

Most hosting will be charged on a monthly basis, sometimes with an option to save a little money by paying for a year in advance.

Free and Near Free Hosting:

Our first tier are free services and services that may be included with another solution that you are already paying for separately at no additional charge.

The Book2Read author pages are completely free; that’s a service from Draft2Digital and they hope that you will use their service to distribute your books.

Google Sites is always completely free to use and setup your website, though you can pay them for hosting if you need extraordinarily high storage limits.

You can also get hosting through other software and services you may already have without having to pay extra.

Newsletter services such as MailerLite and ConvertKit, as well as design software Canva, offer free websites if you use their domain name even on their free plans, so you could potentially setup an author website with zero cash up front.

With their paid plans, and with any BookFunnel plan, you will have more options and can point your own domain name at the website you create using their service.

Budget Hosting:

Budget hosting will cost between $2 and $20 per month, often with either a shared hosting server with many different websites on the same server or with a virtual private server, which will only have the sites you put on it.

Whoever you host through will probably give you a control panel interface, which may include installers for popular software packages, but it will be an additional learning curve to get your sites configured.

With shared hosting, you have to worry about who is in your digital neighborhood, and it can be much easier for your site to get infected with malware or blacklisted because other sites on your server have been infected even if yours remains clean.

With virtual private servers, you need to be able to keep your server up to date so that you aren’t targeted due to security vulnerabilities.

Managed Hosting:

Managed hosting will usually cost more than budget hosting, but it takes a lot of the security and updates for your server out of your hands and is put into the hands of people who specialize in it. You can expect managed hosting to cost anywhere from $5 per month to $200+ per month.

If you are using a page builder, such as Wix or Squarespace, then you can expect to spend $16-$20 per month for their basic plans. If you want to use Shopify, they start at $39 per month but there may be additional fees depending on what you need on your site.

Another option is to use managed hosting for popular software packages such as Ghost or WordPress. We are most familiar with WordPress hosting because it’s our CMS of choice, and you can get a managed WordPress plan starting at $11-$59 per month per site depending on who you choose to host with (WordPress.com and WPEngine, respectively.) If you are going to use a full hands-on hosted service like this, then Rocket.net starts at $30 per month and is a better solution than the other two.

There’s also companies that will handle management of a virtual private server for you. It is a little more technical than using a service that handles everything but is much easier than trying to manage a server yourself. I am a fan of Cloudways and xCloud, both of whom will setup and configure a server for a simple author website starting at $5 per month and will be much more reliable than using a budget plan. (The Apex Authors website is currently managed through Cloudways, and our other sites are on xCloud, which is where we’ll be migrating to sometime later this year.)

Software

Software is a little trickier to price out, and is less consistent with how it’s priced. Some software is open source and can be freely used, with community support also being free or with some options for paid support if you need it. Other software may require a 1-time license, or a monthly or annual subscription. Others may even be some mix of all of the above!

Software such as Ghost and WordPress can be downloaded and installed on your own server for free, or using a 1-click installer through your hosting company.

Some plugins or themes, however, may come with a cost that you will have to pay for separately. If you are using a lot of professional tools, you can quickly discover that your “free” software on your website is actually costing you hundreds of dollars per year.

For a basic author website, however, you can probably start out with free software or software that is included in your hosting costs. So hopefully, there won’t be much of an extra expense here until you are ready for it.

Labor

The final cost is for labor, and there are two ways to price that out. There’s the time you spend setting up your website, or there’s the money you spend paying somebody else to do it.

It is hard to estimate how long it would take you to setup any site; that will depend on how familiar you are with web design, if you have a good tutorial to follow, and what sort of site you are setting up. A page builder site will be faster than creating a custom theme for a WordPress site, for example.

Similarly, the costs for labor can vary widely. If you only need somebody to connect your domain to your MailerLite or Google Sites account, then you can probably find somebody on a gig site to do it for $5-$20.

If you are hiring somebody to build you a custom website from scratch, that could easily run you into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Realistically, you can find people who can put your site together for you and teach you how to use it much faster than you could do it yourself for $20-$50 per hour.

Ultimately…

Your author website is an investment in yourself and your future. It's a place to cultivate your readership, control your narrative, and build a sustainable platform for your writing career. Whether you're rapidly releasing a book as part of a challenge or methodically building your backlist, a well-crafted website provides the foundation for lasting success.

Don't view it as a chore, but as a powerful tool that empowers you to connect with readers on your own terms and chart your own course in the ever-evolving world of publishing. Embrace the opportunity, start building, and watch your author platform grow.

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