14 Things I Have Learned about Book Author Websites

On Minding the Gate | 20 April 2008 with 3 comments

After tracking down Neal Stephenson’s site — and being disappointed with it — I started thinking about author websites again. Who should own them? Who should control them? What platform should they be built on? Who should build them? And who should pay to have them built and maintained? Questions that have been following me around for two years or more.

Kanye West just launched KanyeUniverseCity and 50cent is using the ning.com platform at Thisis50.com. Clearly book authors have a long way to go.

Here are 14 things I have learned from handling author sites.

1. If you don’t have a website you don’t exist.
2. Author websites are different than book websites. Blogs, twitter, myspace and facebook are different tools, use them in different ways.
3. Voice is important; authors should update the author website.
4. Frequency is important. It is like shopping for produce, people like to buy fresh.
5. Frequency isn’t as important as you may think. If you are writing, it is fine to update posts once every two weeks, but broadcast that fact beforehand. Keep tour info or product info as up-to-date as possible.
6. Free is your friend. Make your work available in its entirety. If someone is willing to read your 400 page novel on screen, you have found a fan for life.
7. Access is vital. Be available to your fans. If they want to talk to you, talk to them back.
8. The author should register the author url. The publisher should register the book url.
9. Author websites are best in the form of authorname.com
10. Authorname.ca is ok for authors that write in areas that will never sell internationally.
11. If possible both authorname.ca and authorname.com should be registered.
12. The url for bookname.com should be updated by the publisher with publicity info.
13. The url bookname.com is for “type in” web traffic only. There is no point in trying to SEO-to-death a site like this in hopes of aiding discovery.
14. There is nothing wrong with a publisher redirecting bookname.com to their catalogue page

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