Author websites that get it right, and what the rest get wrong

I went looking for the best author websites and counted the navigation on a set of well known ones. The pattern is consistent, and it is a structural problem rather than a matter of taste.

Lists of the best author websites are easy to write and useless to read. A screenshot tells you nothing about whether the site works, and ”clean design, great typography” is what people write when they have not looked past the header.

So I did something duller and more useful. I went through the navigation of a set of well known author sites and counted. Navigation is where the thinking is visible, because it is the one place where somebody had to decide what matters.

The method, so you can argue with it

For each site I pulled the main navigation and counted top level items, then read them as a stranger would: does this label describe something I want to do, or something the author has made. I also noted the page weight, because a page that takes a long time to arrive is a design decision whether or not anyone made it deliberately.

This is not a usability test. I have not watched anyone use these sites and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is a structural read, and structural reads catch a specific class of problem very reliably.

What the best author websites get right

Austin Kleon

Six items: Blog, Books, Newsletter, Speaking, About, Contact. Around 61 KB of HTML.

Every item is a verb in disguise. Read something, buy something, subscribe, book me, find out who I am, get in touch. Those map almost exactly onto the four reasons anyone lands on an author site. Newsletter is in the main navigation rather than buried, which tells you what he thinks the site is for.

The blog matters more than it looks. It is the reason the site has a purpose between book launches, which is the problem most author sites never solve.

What goes wrong, and why it is not about taste

The menu that is a bibliography

One extremely successful romance author has seven items in the main navigation, and all seven are book titles. Another has fifteen, most of them titles of books and series.

Try it as a newcomer. Someone told you to read this author. You land on the site and the menu offers you seven proper nouns you have never seen. There is no way to choose, because choosing requires the knowledge you came to get.

This is not a small thing. It fails the single most common visitor: the one deciding whether to try you. For an established author with a devoted audience the cost is hidden, because the devoted audience already knows the titles. The people it loses are the ones who were never going to tell you they left.

The menu that is a shop

One major fantasy author’s navigation is thirteen items and effectively the whole thing is merchandise: leatherbounds, printed books, digital books, new products, swag, apparel, decals and stickers, toys and games, art prints. Around 222 KB of HTML.

To be fair, that site is doing something unusual and doing it deliberately. He sells directly at a scale almost no author reaches, so the shop is the business. It works for him.

It is a terrible model to copy. If you are not running a direct sales operation, a navigation of product categories answers a question nobody arrived with, and it buries the two things that would actually help you: what do you write, and how do I hear about the next one.

The site that is a wall

Several of the sites I looked at had no obvious newsletter signup above the fold and no visible contact route from the home page. One had neither a newsletter link nor a contact page reachable from the main navigation at all.

For an author with a publisher and an agent that may be a deliberate choice about being left alone, which is legitimate. For anyone else it removes the only two mechanisms that turn a visit into a relationship.

The pattern underneath all of it

Author sites are organised around what the author produced. Visitors arrive with a question about themselves: is this for me, where do I start, how do I hear about the next one.

Nielsen Norman Group’s work on mental models describes what happens when the two do not line up. People do not patiently search. They conclude the answer is not there and leave, and they leave believing the site was unhelpful rather than badly organised. You never find out.

The fix is unglamorous. Group the navigation by what a visitor wants to do, put every book behind one Books item, and let the individual titles live one level down where they belong.

A test you can run in ten minutes

Ask someone who has never read you to look at your home page for ten seconds. Then take it away and ask them three questions.

• What does this person write
• Which book should you start with
• How would you find out when the next one is out

If they cannot answer all three, the problem is structure and no amount of new photography will fix it. Research summarised by NN/g puts the first aesthetic judgement at roughly 50 milliseconds, so they have formed an impression long before they have found anything. The ten seconds is generous.

What I would keep from each of them

• From Kleon: a navigation of six items where every one is something to do, and a newsletter that is treated as a main destination rather than a footer afterthought.
• From the bibliography menus: the book pages themselves are often genuinely good. The mistake is promoting them to the top level, not making them.
• From the shop: the confidence to sell directly, if and only if you actually have the audience to support it.

What I would not keep is the assumption that a site should mirror a career. A career is a list. A visit is a question.

The reasoning behind all of this is in part one of this series, and the next part goes page by page through what actually belongs where. If you want to see how I separate structure from surface, that is in why I design UI and UX separately, and what I work with is on what I do.