What an author website is actually for

Your site and your email list are the only two places where the connection between you and a reader belongs to you. Most author websites are built to prove the author exists instead.

Most author websites are built to prove that the author exists. That is a low bar, and it is the wrong one.

An author website has one job that nothing else can do. Every other channel you use is rented. A publisher decides what to promote and when. A retailer owns the customer relationship, not you. A social platform can change what your followers see overnight, and has. Your own site and your own email list are the only two places where the connection between you and a reader belongs to you.

So the question is not whether it looks nice. The question is whether it does that job.

The four things a visitor actually came for

People arrive at an author site in one of four states, and almost nothing else.

1. They just finished one of your books and want the next one. The most valuable visitor you will ever get, and the easiest to lose.
2. Someone recommended you and they are deciding whether to try. They want to know what you write and whether it is for them.
3. They want to be told when the next book comes out. This is the one that turns a reader into an audience.
4. They want something from you professionally. An interview, a festival appearance, a school visit, a rights enquiry.

Four states. If your site answers those four quickly, it works. Everything else is decoration.

Why most author websites fail this, and it is not about taste

I went through the navigation on a set of well known author sites. The pattern is consistent and it is a structural problem, not an aesthetic one.

One bestselling romance author’s main navigation is seven items, and all seven are book titles. Another author’s is fifteen items, most of them titles of books and series. A third is thirteen items and the entire menu is a shop: leatherbounds, apparel, decals, art prints, toys.

Now put a visitor in front of that. They arrived in state two: someone recommended this author and they are deciding whether to try. Their question is ”what does this person write and where do I start.” The menu answers a different question entirely, which is ”what has this person produced.” Those are not the same thing, and only one of them is the visitor’s.

Nielsen Norman Group calls this a mismatch with the user’s mental model, and the consequence they describe is specific: when the structure does not match what someone expects, they assume the site does not have the answer rather than keep looking. Not that they looked and failed. That they concluded it was not there.

The counterexample is Austin Kleon’s site. Six items in the navigation: Blog, Books, Newsletter, Speaking, About, Contact. Every single one is a thing a visitor wants to do rather than a thing he has made. It is also about a third of the page weight of the sites with the long menus, which is not a coincidence.

The clock you are working against

Research summarised by NN/g puts the first aesthetic judgement of a page at around 50 milliseconds, from a study by Lindgaard and colleagues published in Behaviour and Information Technology in 2006. Fifty milliseconds is faster than a deliberate thought. It is a reaction.

That does not mean design is everything. It means the impression is set before anyone reads a word, and everything you write afterwards is either working with that impression or against it.

What the site is actually optimising for

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most author sites are optimised to make the author feel represented. Every book gets a menu item because every book took a year. Every award gets a line because it mattered. The site becomes a record of a career.

A site that does its job is optimised for a stranger with a question and about ninety seconds of patience. Those are different design briefs and they produce different sites, and only one of them sells books.

This is not an argument for stripping out personality. It is an argument for putting the personality in the writing and the pictures rather than in the information architecture. Structure should be boring and obvious. Voice should not be.

The two numbers worth caring about

Forget page views. There are two things worth measuring on an author site.

How many people join the email list. That is the only number that compounds. A reader on your list is a reader you can reach when the next book lands, without asking a platform for permission.

How many people click through to buy. Not whether they bought, which you usually cannot see, but whether they got as far as trying. If people are reaching the book page and not clicking on to a retailer, the problem is on your page, not at the retailer.

Both are measurable with free tools and neither requires a specialist.

What this means if you are about to build one

Start with the four states. Write down, for each one, the shortest path from the home page to a satisfied visitor. Then build that, and add nothing until it works.

The most common mistake is not an ugly site. It is a site organised around the writer’s career instead of the reader’s question, which looks perfectly fine and quietly loses people.

In the next part of this series I go through real author sites in detail, what works on them and what does not. After that, the anatomy: what actually belongs on each page and in what order.

If you want to see how I approach structure before surface, that is in why I design UI and UX separately, and what I work with is on what I do.