Author Websites: A Simple Guide For Aspiring Authors
An author’s website is important for every author. They allow authors to communicate with the audience and showcase what they have to offer. Moreover, most authors nowadays hire book marketing services to develop their author websites. But why? Because they have a professional team of website designers and developers who can bring the best out of their creative imagination while allowing readers to gain interest in your publications. So, whether you need a children’s author website design or a more mature non-fiction author website design, hiring website design services can be your best bet.
But that doesn’t mean that you stay unaware of the basics of author websites. It is your responsibility as an author to be knowledgeable about every aspect that aids in getting your book in front of readers. So, to help you understand how you should design an author website, along with some tips on making your website dominate the rest, I have compiled a quick guide to enable you to determine what pages you should feature in your website and what strategies you should utilize to make your website stand out from the rest. But first, let’s take a quick recap of what an author’s website is. So, let’s start with the following:
What Are Author Websites?
Authors use author websites to build a strong online presence among their target audience. With a well-designed author website, authors can sell their books to their target readers, display their book reviews and blurbs, and strengthen their book marketing and author branding strategies.
Moreover, having an author website puts you on an equal footing with almost every other published writer in this digital age, regardless of whether you write best-selling fiction or non-fiction, have a history of publishing children’s books on your own, or are ready to release your first book series.
The Structure Of An Author’s Website
You don’t need to have a bestseller out in the world to benefit from an author’s website. When you build your author platform for the web, here are four pages you should consider:
An author website might be useful to you even if your book hasn’t become a worldwide bestseller. Here are four pages to think about while creating your author platform for the web:
Homepage
Making a solid first impression depends on your homepage, often known as your landing page. Consider teasing facts that will lead visitors further into your website so potential readers can get to know you better. For example, the homepage should have an easily accessible header that directs visitors to links where they can buy your books, visit your social media profiles, and browse other website pages.
About Page
If someone is considering reading your books or already loves them, they might be curious to learn more about the person behind the author. That’s why your website should feature a page just for the author’s biography. This way, you can tell your readers more about yourself. But try to keep it professional and not too lengthy. This can be the ideal opportunity to explain how and why you started writing thrillers, romance novels, children’s books, or whatever genre you write in.
Book Page
Even if you want to allow your website to redirect to other online bookstores offering your books, you should make an effort to develop a dedicated page promoting your book. Create sections with synopses, book covers, and positive book reviews for each of your titles. Moreover, you can either make a dedicated page for your recent book or make it the center of attraction of a larger book page to promote it.
Contact Page
Give your readers a way to get in touch with you and provide their contact details, such as a contact form. You can choose to put an email sign-up option on this page and throughout the rest of your website in order to add individuals to your own email list. In addition, you can keep your present and future fans enthusiastic about your work by distributing an email newsletter with personalized content.
How To Give Your Author Website A Competitive Edge?
Setting up a foundation for an author’s website is important, but you must also stay on top of the developments. So, here are some strategies you can implement to give your author website a competitive edge:
Educate Yourself About The Modern Website Designs
Like all other kinds of website designs, author website design is far more advanced today than it was before. Your website needs to be responsive and should adjust to the screen size of whatever device your visitors are using. It should have an attractive color scheme, welcoming fonts, and artistic illustrations. Check out more author website examples in addition to studying the fundamentals of website designing, even whether you want to use a simple website template or hire a website designing service.
Offer Your Website Visitors Something Unique
Giving your users something unique can help you gain something in return. For example, it might include a user’s contact information for a mailing list. Moreover, if someone chooses to subscribe to your newsletter, you might want to use an interactive pop-up banner to give them a sneak peek of your latest book or something else. You can also embed the banner on your homepage as an alternative. Make this first conversation between you and the user feel unique to you and true to who you are.
Stay Active On Your Social Media Accounts
Building your own website is just the beginning. It should also link to other social media accounts that show your engagement with readers on social media. For example, suppose people sign up for your email list and follow you on social media. In that case, you can keep them informed about the publishing date of your upcoming book, events or podcast appearances, and anything else important to your professional success.
Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization
With search engine optimization, you can ensure that your website appears in search results whenever your target audience searches for anything relevant to your book. For example, you can ensure your author’s website is the best one you could have created and will rank better in search results by incorporating specific keywords and phrases into its metadata and content. In this case, hiring a book marketing service for SEO can be your best bet. In addition, they have a professional team of digital marketers who are well-equipped with the latest SEO strategies and can help you rank your website higher in search engine rankings.
Conclusion
So, whether you need an author website for your crime-thriller book or want to develop a children’s book author website, it’s your responsibility to research everything that you must know before start developing your website. All you need to do is to consider the tips mentioned above and strategies while developing your author’s website.
Moreover, you can also hire professional website design services to help you design the best website for your genre. They are well aware of the latest literary trends and can significantly help you design a website that not only dominates other author websites in your genre but also helps you gain the attention you are long looking for from your target audience.
