April 3, 2024

What you need to include in a good author website design

You can find some platforms that you can use to drive traffic to your blog while others are great for non-fiction writers. But when it comes to a great marketing strategy to make sure that your book succeeds out there, you need an excellent author website design. As an author, you may not think that author websites are important, though they tend to be valuable in this digital world. 

Having a good author website can be a crucial step for you to become a successful author. You just need to do right so that you can increase your audience, improve your engagement, and even look more professional. This post explains what you need to include in a good author website design.   

An author biography

The best author websites available on the market usually have the author biography. Take note that your author site is just like your business. As a writer, you should always promote yourself in the same way as you do if you run a business. Therefore, you should also treat your site in the same way.

You may sometimes find it easier to write a book, but it can be a huge challenge to write your biography. The truth is that most writers fall short on this. Your biography should include the reasons for the audience to read your book, your description, the things that have influenced you, and the people you admire. If you write books that inform other people, you should pay attention to your biography. You need to make sure that you are offering your audience enough information associated with your experience and credentials. You can build credibility and trust by doing this.  

Book pages

If you have several books, ensure that each book has its page. A page can look great when you show them your novel, and not just tell the readers about it. Therefore, you should make sure that you include an excellent image of the book cover and a good synopsis. Keep in mind that you should avoid incorporating any spoilers. The aim is to offer the potential readers just enough to leave them with the desire to purchase your book right away. 

With on-page SEO, it’s crucial to create a well-organised website. Therefore, you need to make sure that you have a separate page for your book that you wrote. This helps to ensure that people searching for you on the internet find you easily. But if you have all your books placed on one page, it can affect your search engine ranking. Also, it can be hard for your audience to find what they want.

A blog

If you are a writer, then visitors to your author site may want to determine that you can write. The blog of an author needs to look different from that of an online store or business. You can improve your blogging efforts by avoiding focusing on building authority and answering questions. Instead, you should build a community and offer back stories. 

You can take the space to make it a place where your audience can regularly go to for more updates. You can ask your readers to subscribe when they finish reading the post, but you need to give them high-quality updates. One of the ways you can choose is to write short stories that can touch the side and back of your books. Alternatively, you can create character sketches that include the characters your readers love.

You can take some breaks, but you can decide to utilize your blog to talk about the changes happening in the publishing industry or even offer some tips to new writers. The intention is to create an excellent author website blog, so you should build a community and form a connection with your audience. You need to make sure that you interact with your readers in the comments section and answer their questions. 

Speaking engagements

If you are involved in speaking engagements, you have to add the speaking engagements page to your website. The good thing about author website designers is that they usually have pre-made pages that have organized calendars. Therefore, if you add this page, you should ensure that you update it regularly with new details and monitor it to check that there is nothing irrelevant still on it. Therefore, if the date of the conference changes, you need to make some changes on your page right away. 

But if you are not involved in speaking engagements, you can decide to attend events or hold your writing workshop. If you have the slightest interest in speaking engagements, it’s a good idea to include a page on your site for it. This allows your visitors to know that you are open to the idea or even looking for an event to speak at. There is a good chance that some visitors can decide to fill up your schedule with requests because they saw your page. Hence, your website needs to include this page.   

Media and reviews

Most people can access book reviews on some platforms, such as Amazon, but it doesn’t make sense to let your potential readers use other sites when they are already visiting your website. Your products are books, so your website needs to include reviews about these books.

And, if you have a public relations team, then you can decide to dedicate your site’s section to a media and PR page. Keep in mind that this is where you can put things, such as press releases concerning your most recent published books or media contact details. 

This is also a great place where you should include any links to some articles that were published about your books or you as an author. This can seem like self-promoting but it’s not. Most businesses usually do this when they want to show off their achievements and awards. If you intend to get more traction on the market to sell more books online, your author site needs to include book reviews on every book page.