Your Author Platform – Website
Your Website is Your Author Home
You may have heard about an Author Page on Facebook or Amazon. These help your marketing, but before you start marketing, you need your own author home—your website. It’s yours. You own it.
If Facebook or Amazon disappeared, you still have a place to connect with readers. If you go wide and publish on Kobo or GooglePlay or iBooks, you still have one place, your place, that you control to connect with readers.
You own your website. You control your website. You share your author personality, your books, and your thoughts in one place.
Create Your Author Website
Your author website is the foundation of your author platform. It’s your author base camp. Any sharing you do later on social media or with email campaigns will direct readers to your website.
You can use free website services like WordPress.com or Flowwwsites to get started. These websites create a structure for your website, all you need to do is add content. You don’t have to worry about technical skills or coding.
If you have time and resources, you can become more involved and intricate with a self-hosted website using WordPress.org. You will need to monitor and update the self-hosted website for updates or hire someone to manage the site for you. If you have a large budget, you can hire a website designer to create a site for you. If you do, make sure you have access to add and change the content.
Get going with your website. Everything need not be perfect from the start. You can always go back and change things. Add a different image. Rewrite your introduction. The main thing now, to start your author platform, is set up your website.
Basic Pages for Your Website
Your website will have several pages. You can add more later, but here are the basic pages you’ll need to get started.
- An introduction to you as an author. A friendly welcome to readers. Once you set up your email, add a link to join your mailing list.
- Your bio and some words about why you are writing the book.
- A page just for the book. Give potential readers a taste of the book with the book description and a brief excerpt from your book. Once you publish your book, you will add links to where readers can buy your book.
- A blog page. Most free and paid website services include a blog page. Update this with articles regularly, at least once a month if not more regularly. The key is to be consistent. Write about your progress, your research, and your challenges. Readers love a personal feel.
You have a head start with the go public steps you prepared: your book description, bios, author portrait, and book cover image. Use these basics to create the pages on your website. Don’t worry if your website is not perfect, you can always edit your pages to refine your message.
Set up your blog schedule. As you are starting on developing your platform, you may write once a month or once a week. It’s up to you. Your goal is to be consistent. Set a reasonable goal and then stick to it. Once your readers are familiar with your schedule, they’ll look forward to your new posts. It’s better to have a schedule you can manage long-term than over-commit.
Later on, you may have pages for media publicity once your book is published. For now,
Your first priority is writing your mystery novel.
There’s a lot of work in creating an author platform. And, your website is a start. But, there’s more. Next week, I’ll talk about connecting to readers with email.
