22 Great Tips for Creating an Author’s Website

• Build a website to promote your new book
For very little money, authors easily can build a website with just limited knowledge of how they’re constructed or how they work. How do you do that, you ask?

• Decide what website will look like
Before constructing your website or even deciding what pages you’ll have on your website, you’ll need to think about what the website page should look like. While each page will differ slightly – one might be a collection of publicity photos that can be downloaded while another is primarily a sample chapter of your book – each page should contain certain elements that are consistent throughout your site. 

• Text is king, design is queen
There’s a lot of great stuff out there about what a website should look like and how to build one. Yet the most important element of any website is the words conveyed on it.

• Web text demands different kind of writing style 
Most people read websites by scanning. That is, they don’t read every word but skim over the page, searching for words that are of interest to them. Once they find those words, their reading may slow to include every word, as if they were reading a magazine article or a novel.

• How to improve your web text’s readability
Every word counts when you write text for the web. The moment readers have difficulty following you or are no longer engaged is the moment they click to another website. Because of this, you must focus on achieving readability and the right tone.

• Pay attention to tone on your author website
Along with achieving the right level of readability in your web text, you need to strike the appropriate tone. Tone is the author’s attitude toward a subject. It might be angry or weary or irreverent or any of a thousand other emotions and physical states.

• Fresh, original content is vital
There are more than 2 billion websites on the planet. To get readers to stay on yours and to return, you need to offer what nobody else does – or at least in a way that no one else does. That’s a challenge certainly, but it can be done. Simply follow some basic principles of website text.

• Ensure your book’s website is navigable
A major factor to consider about constructing your website promoting your book is how visitors will be able move between all of the pages you’ve constructed for them. The ability to do this is called navigation. 

• Pages needed for your website
Once you’ve determined the appearance of your website, the next step is to plan how it’ll be organized. This is called the site architecture. You’ll decide what pages will be on your website and the order in which they will be arranged.

• Home page 
The first page of your website that most potential readers and the media likely will see is your home page. This page serves as an introduction to your book.
 
• What Others are Saying page
Often readers make book purchases based on what others – friends, family, similar-minded readers, critics – say about the title. There are reasons sites like Goodreads and Amazon.com reviews are so popular. Before laying down money, readers like to see if a book was entertaining, stimulating or useful. Your own website can contain favorable excerpts from such reviews and articles. The more such commentary you can place on the page, the better.

• Pay attention to your author’s bio pic 
One of the elements of a self-published book that shouldn’t be overlooked is the author’s photograph. While the photo often is a thumbnail or even smaller, it can subtly affect a reader’s decision to purchase your book. 

• Interview with the Author Page
Readers love to learn about the authors of their favorite books. You can help foster that love – and in doing so get them to purchase your next book – by including a page on your website in which you are interviewed.

• Sample chapter page
If the book you’re promoting is the first one you’ve published, readers most likely will be unfamiliar with you or your writing. Further, given the vast number of other authors out there, a potential reader might decide to pass over you for another one who is slightly better well known or who has more writing credits to their name. You can counterbalance this by giving readers a free sample of your writing, proving to them that you’re the superior writer with the best book.

• Photo gallery page
If you’re serious about receiving media attention – either from newspapers and magazines or from bloggers and online journals – you’ll want to have a photo gallery page on your website. After you’ve been interviewed or if your book is being reviewed, that writer will want pictures of you that can be used with the piece.

• Contact page
A Contact page provides information about how to reach the author or whoever is responsible for handling your communications (executive assistant, agent, manager, etc.).

• How to promote multiple books on your website 
If you’ve written multiple books, the big question facing you is if your website should focus on you the author or on the latest book you’ve published.

• How to drive traffic to your website
While creating a website is an excellent idea, it won’t help you much if you no one sees it. That means you’ll need to promote it, which we’ll cover in upcoming entries. But even when not promoting your website, there are ways to drive visitors (aka as “traffic”) to it.

• Increase website visits with strategic SEO
Search Engine Optimization is another way to improve your page rank. As search engine robots and crawlers check over your website, they seek key words so that someone using a search engine gets sites that best match their needs. Simply incorporating certain keywords into your website text will improve the chances of someone finding your site when they search for those words.

• Add share buttons to your website
When building a website to promote your books(s), one element to include on each page is a share button. A share button allows visitors to literally tell the world about your page.

• How to put a “buy now” button for your website
If you sell your books or services from your own website, you’ll want to take the time to set up a “buy now” button there. With a buy now button, readers or clients can make a payment via credit card with just a click. 

• How to accept credit card purchases on your site 
One of the main reasons authors lose book sales online is that potential readers have no immediate way to make purchases. This is true even when the author’s web page includes a link that brings readers back to an Amazon.com listing page, a Zazzle page, or a similar site, which the reader doesn’t find or simply never clicks.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

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