Build Your Author Website

Build Your Author Website
Teacher: ITSme Society

Most artists have online portfolios to showcase their work, and so should authors!
All authors, published or unpublished, should have websites to share their writing journey, showcase their work, and allow others to learn more about them. Are you an author? If so an author website offers many benefits, helping you make connections in the industry and keep your readers up to date.

Benefits for Published Authors
For published authors, your website is a platform to direct sales to your books and connect more with your readers. Readers are likely to look for more books by an author they like and your website can give them an easy place to find them! Make sure to include links to buy your books. Your website is also a great place to tease what’s next. Let people know what you are working on and get them excited! This connection with your readers is great to help you promote your work. Even professionally published authors often need to do the bulk of promotion for their books themselves.

Benefits for Unpublished Authors
If you haven’t been published yet, your website can help you start building connections in the industry. It is a place for agents and publishers to learn more about you, your writing style, and read samples of your work. These should be short samples, poems, short stories, or excerpts from longer works. This will give them an understanding of your skill and help them decide if your work is a fit for their agency or publishing house.

What You Should Include
Published or unpublished, there are a few things you definitely need on your author website. Aside from your books or writing samples mentioned above, your website should have a short bio, information about your writing, and links to your social media.

Your biography:
Your bio can be pretty short, with just a little information about where you are from, anything unique about you, any big projects you were involved in, or past relevant education. The information about your writing should be longer and include, the types of books you write (fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, YA), any genres you enjoy writing (mystery, thriller, romance, fantasy), what inspires you, what you hope people can get from your books, and anything else about how and what you write. This is the space for people to understand more about what they can expect from your work.

Social media:
Including links to your other social media accounts will help people find you other places. Your social media will also come in handy when sharing your website. Just setting up your website won’t get you the connections you want. Now you have to share your website with everyone. Share your website on social media, send it to your agent, to your friends, share it when you go to events, and anywhere else you can.

Contact page:
A contact page tells people the best way to reach you. You can either have your email address, a form for people to fill out, or both. This is also where you can include the links to your social media sites.

Updating Your Website
Now that your website is set up and shared, you will need to update it every so often to give people a reason to keep coming back. You can write blogs, share writing tips or worksheets, or other unique content. These things will keep people coming back, and help you build strong connections.
At the end of the day, make sure not to stress about updating your website. Only update it when you have something to share. Every few months is fine, especially if you are just starting out. After you post new content make sure to share your updates via social media to get it out to more people, and attract people back to your site!

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