A good author website doesn't just tell people you've written a book. It earns credibility with readers who don't know you yet, converts visitors into newsletter subscribers, gives agents and publishers a professional first impression, and gets found on Google when people search for your name or your genre. If your site isn't doing at least three of those four things, it's underperforming regardless of how good it looks.
Step 1: Choose your platform
The platform decision comes first because it shapes everything else: how much you can customise, how well you can rank on Google, and how much you'll spend over the next several years. The honest breakdown:
Best for: debut authors on a deadline
Fast to set up, genuinely beautiful templates, no technical knowledge required. The ceiling is low SEO is limited, you can't own the design, and you're paying $276+/year forever but if you need something live before a book launch in six weeks, it's the right tool.
Best for: authors who want control
Full SEO capability, genuine ownership, and a massive ecosystem of tools. The tradeoff is maintenance: plugin updates, hosting decisions, security patches. Not technically hard, but it requires ongoing attention. Many authors find the overhead distracts from writing.
Best for: very early-stage, very tight budget
The cheapest way to have something. The templates are less polished than Squarespace, the SEO limitations are similar, and the design ceiling is lower. Useful as a placeholder but rarely a long-term solution for authors building a serious career.
Best for: authors ready to invest in their brand
Built specifically for you your genre, your books, your voice. No templates, no ongoing subscription, full SEO control. Higher upfront cost, but you own it outright and it performs differently to anything template-based. The cost comparison often surprises people.
If you're not sure which is right for you, the full platform comparison walks through the real costs and tradeoffs across each option.
Step 2: Pick your domain
Your domain is your permanent address. Get this decision right and you won't need to revisit it.
Your name is almost always the right domain. yourname.com is what readers, agents, and publishers will type when they want to find you. It's also what Google trusts most as a signal of authorship and authority. If your name is common and the .com is taken, try adding "author" or "books" janesmithauthor.com or janesmith.books. Avoid hyphens: they're hard to say out loud, easy to mistype, and look less professional.
Use your legal name or your pen name not your book title. Books have a shorter shelf life than careers. If your domain is the-midnight-threshold.com and your next book is a different title, you've built equity in the wrong place. Your name is the constant.
Your domain is the one decision you make before your career starts that follows you for the rest of it. Prioritise longevity over cleverness.
Register it today, even if your site isn't ready. Domains cost $10–$15 a year. If your name is available and you don't register it, someone else might and buying it back is rarely cheap. Namecheap and Google Domains are both reliable registrars.
Step 3: The pages every author website needs
Most author websites have too many pages and the wrong ones. Here's what actually matters, in order of priority.
Home
Your home page has one job: tell a first-time visitor who you are and what you write, then give them somewhere to go next. It should answer three questions within the first few seconds: Who is this person? What do they write? Why should I keep reading? Everything else the full bio, the detailed book descriptions, the press quotes belongs on other pages.
About
The about page is where readers decide whether to trust you. The mistake most authors make is treating it like a CV a list of publications, awards, and credentials. Readers aren't hiring you. They want to know what kind of person wrote these books, why you write what you write, and whether your sensibility matches theirs. Write in first person. Let your voice come through.
Books
One page per book (or book series), not one long scrolling list. Each book page should have the cover, a strong sales description, the genre and comp titles, buy links for all major retailers, and if you have it a short excerpt or early praise. This is the page agents and publishers look at. It should be impossible to leave without understanding what makes this book worth reading.
Contact
Make it easy. A visible email address (or a simple contact form that actually reaches you) is enough. The harder you make it to reach you, the fewer people will try and the people who give up are often exactly the ones you wanted to hear from.
Newsletter opt-in (essential, not optional)
Your email list is the one reader relationship you own. Social media accounts can be banned, algorithms can change, platforms can disappear. Your newsletter list belongs to you. Put a signup form on every page ideally with a specific reason to subscribe, not just "join my mailing list."
Blog (optional, but valuable if you'll use it)
A blog only helps you if you write it consistently. A blog with three posts from 2021 is worse than no blog at all it signals neglect. If you're going to maintain one, publish at a cadence you can sustain: once a month is enough if the posts are genuinely useful. If you won't, skip it and invest that energy elsewhere.
Step 4: What to write on each page
The words on your author website matter more than the design. A beautifully designed site with weak copy won't convert readers. Here's the one thing each page needs to get right.
Home page: Lead with a hook that names your genre and positions your work in terms that a reader in your genre would recognise immediately. "Dark, atmospheric literary fiction for readers of Donna Tartt" is more useful than "I write stories about the human condition." The more specific you are, the more the right readers will feel found.
About page: Write toward the reader, not away from them. Instead of "I was born in Edinburgh and studied at the University of St Andrews," try "I write the kind of suspense novels I used to read under the covers with a torch the ones that keep you reading past midnight and slightly unnerved by morning." Your credentials belong in a short bio at the bottom. Your voice goes at the top.
Book pages: Study how your book is positioned on its publisher page and on Amazon. Then write something better. The flap copy is a starting point, not a ceiling. You know what's in the book better than anyone lead with the tension, the specific world, the feeling a reader will have on page one.
Want someone to handle all of this for you?
We build and write the whole thing design, copy, SEO, launch. You focus on the writing.
Step 5: SEO basics for author websites
Search engine optimisation for author websites isn't complicated, but most authors skip it entirely. Here's what actually moves the needle.
Your name is your most important keyword. Make sure your full name appears in the page title, in the first paragraph of your home page, and in your about page heading. When someone Googles your name, your website should be the first result and if it isn't, that's a problem worth fixing.
Each page should target one specific phrase. Your books page might target "your name books" or "your genre author books." Your about page targets your name. A blog post targets a specific question readers in your genre are searching for. Don't try to rank every page for everything one well-targeted page beats ten generic ones.
Page titles and meta descriptions matter. The title tag is what appears in the Google search result. It should include your target keyword and give a reason to click. The meta description (the short summary below the title) won't affect your ranking, but it affects whether people click which eventually does. Write them for humans, not algorithms.
Alt text on images helps. Every image on your site should have descriptive alt text not just for SEO, but for accessibility. For your author photo: "Author Jane Smith literary fiction writer." For book covers: "Cover of The Midnight Threshold by Jane Smith." Two seconds of work per image, done once.
Page speed matters more than most authors realise. Google uses page load time as a ranking signal, and readers abandon slow sites quickly. If you're on Squarespace with a lot of high-resolution images, your site is probably slower than it needs to be. Compress images before uploading a cover image doesn't need to be 8MB to look good on screen.
Step 6: Launch checklist
Before you tell anyone your site is live, run through this list.
- Test on mobile. More than half of your visitors will be on a phone. Every page should be legible, every button tappable, and no image should be cropped in a way that makes it unrecognisable.
- Check every link. Click every internal link and every buy link. A broken link to your book's Amazon page is a lost sale.
- Confirm your contact works. Send yourself a test message through your contact form or email link. Make sure it arrives.
- Verify your newsletter opt-in. Subscribe with a secondary email address. Confirm that the confirmation email arrives and the welcome sequence sends correctly.
- Set up Google Search Console. It's free, takes ten minutes, and tells you which searches bring people to your site. Submit your sitemap once you're live so Google indexes your pages faster.
- Install analytics. You can't improve what you can't measure. Google Analytics 4 is free. At minimum, you want to know how many people visit, which pages they read, and where they come from.
- Check your page titles and meta descriptions. Paste your URL into a browser in incognito mode and look at what appears in the tab. It should say your name and something specific about the page, not "Home" or "Untitled."
- Tell your newsletter list. Your existing readers are your most reliable source of early traffic. Send a short email letting them know the new site is live and what's changed.
Or skip all of this
Everything in this guide can be done by an author willing to put in the time. The platform research, the domain registration, the page writing, the SEO setup none of it is technically beyond reach.
But it's a lot of time. Time that isn't being spent on the next book, the query letters, the revision that's been waiting for two months. For some authors, doing it themselves is the right call especially early in a career, when budget is tight and the site just needs to exist.
For others, the better use of their time is to hand the whole project to someone who's built author websites before and knows exactly what they need to do. If that's you, we'd be glad to talk.