What actually belongs on an author website

What belongs on an author website, in six pages: what goes on each, and in what order. Build only what is on this list and you will have a better site than most working authors.

This is the practical one. What belongs on an author website, in six pages: what goes on each, and in what order. If you build only what is on this list you will have a better site than most working authors.

The order matters. Everything here is arranged around the four reasons anyone lands on an author site: they finished a book and want the next, they are deciding whether to try you, they want to be told when the next one lands, or they want something from you professionally.

1. Home

The home page has one job: answer ”what does this person write” before anyone scrolls.

• One sentence that says what you write. Genre, tone, who it is for. Not a tagline, a sentence. ”I write slow, funny crime novels set in small Swedish towns” beats anything with the word ”storyteller” in it.
• The current book, once, with a cover and one line. Not a carousel of nine books.
• One clear route to the newsletter. Above the fold, with a reason to sign up that is not ”get updates”. Tell people what they get and roughly how often.
• A photograph of you. It does more work than any amount of design. People connect to writers, not to book covers.

What does not belong: a full bibliography, an award list, a blog feed, and anything that moves on its own.

2. Books

One page listing everything, with series grouped and reading order made explicit. Then one page per book.

A book page needs, in this order:

• Cover, title, and one line of positioning
• The blurb, kept short. Two paragraphs beats five.
• Buy links to several retailers, including at least one independent option. Not one Amazon button.
• Where it sits in a series, and what to read first
• Two or three review quotes with attribution, not fifteen

The single most common failure on book pages is not the copy. It is that the buy links are below a long blurb, so the person who already decided has to scroll past a pitch they no longer need. Put the buying decision at the top for the reader who arrived ready, and the persuasion below it for the one who did not.

3. The newsletter page

Yes, its own page, not just a box in the footer.

It should say what subscribers get, how often it goes out, and what happens immediately after signing up. If you offer something in exchange, a short story or a first chapter, that goes here with the file described plainly.

Ask for the email address and nothing else. Every additional field costs you signups, and you do not need someone’s first name to send them a book announcement.

4. About

Two versions on one page, and this is the trick most authors miss.

The reader version first: written in your voice, about what you write and why, with the photograph. This is the one that makes someone decide they like you.

The professional bio below it: third person, publication history, awards, the version a festival programmer or journalist copies and pastes. Offer it in a short and a long form. Making that easy to copy is a small kindness that gets you invited to things.

5. Contact

Say who should contact you about what, and route it. Rights enquiries to your agent. Media to your publicist if you have one. Everything else to you or to a form.

If you do not want reader mail, say so warmly rather than hiding the page. An unfindable contact page reads as a mistake. A page that says ”I read everything and answer slowly” reads as a person.

6. Press or media, only if you need it

If you do events, interviews or school visits, this page saves you hours. Downloadable author photo at print resolution, cover images, both bios, a short list of topics you can speak about, and your booking contact.

If you do none of those things, skip it. An empty press page is worse than no press page.

The blog question

A blog is the only thing that gives an author site a reason to exist between books, which is most of the time. It is also the thing most likely to sit abandoned with a post from three years ago at the top, which actively signals that nothing is happening.

My rule: only start one if you can imagine writing four posts a year forever. Four is enough to keep a site alive. Zero is fine. Two posts and then silence is worse than zero, because the date is visible.

The technical minimum

None of this is exotic and all of it is invisible until it is missing.

• It has to work on a phone, tested by you, with your thumb, on mobile data rather than office wifi.
• Every page needs a title and a description that match what is on it.
• Sharing has to show an image. Paste a link to your own book page into a chat and look. If there is no picture, the Open Graph tags are missing and every recommendation anyone makes of you looks blank.
• Your name should be the page title on the home page. People search for authors by name and then get suspicious when the tab says something else.
• One address per page. If you rebuild, redirect the old addresses rather than leaving them to die.

Where to start if it already exists

Do not redesign. Do this instead, in order.

1. Cut the main navigation to six items or fewer, all of them things a visitor wants to do
2. Move the newsletter signup above the fold on the home page and give it a reason
3. Move buy links above the blurb on every book page
4. Split the About page into a reader version and a copyable professional bio
5. Check what a shared link looks like, and fix it if it is blank

Five changes, none of them a rebuild, and between them they cover the four reasons anyone came.

The reasoning is in part one and the worked examples are in part two. What I work with is on what I do.