How to Build an Author Website Before Your First Book Is Published

This article is for those of you who are serious about your writing but haven't published your first book yet.

Do You Even Need a Website?

If you've chosen to take your book writing journey seriously, that's a great start.

The biggest mistake new authors make is thinking their new career is just about focusing 100% on writing their books. A writing career is half writing, half sales.

Many authors think they'll just get an agent and publisher to handle the sales half. They spend a lot of money hiring an agent. Then the agent has them build an online presence in order to be marketable to publishers.

Even without an agent, if you're recruited by a publisher you will face the hard reality that you have to market your own books.

You can't just expect bookstores to market your books for you: they're very limited in number nowadays and have extremely limited space. They focus on making profits themselves (it's a hard business!) and it's much harder for them to profit from a new author than an established bestselling author.

That leaves online marketing as your primary option. Social media works, but even with a large audience you're limited by how often Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. decide to show your posts. The places that don't limit your visibility are the ones you own fully: your author website and your mailing list.

Choose Your Author Name

It's easiest to use your own real name as your author name. Daniel Roy Greenfeld found this out the hard way when he tried publishing his latest series under a pseudonym, then ran into a wall trying to create a Facebook account under the pseudonym. FB only lets you create an account using your real name. You could market your pseudonymous book in FB groups under your real name account, but then that defeats the purpose of even having a pseudonym.

Choose a Website Builder That Fits Your Needs

We're obviously biased here so take this with a grain of salt, but we're doing everything to make Stead the best author website tool because we need it ourselves.

Part of what makes it the best choice right now is that we're more eager to please customers than any other author website builder. You get a free 30-minute session to help you set up your author website. If you still need help after that, we'll do whatever we can to help you.

We'll even make you a custom theme or build new features in Stead for you, if that's what you need. We're hungry to serve you, and we care.

Choose Your Website Address

On Stead a website address (or "URL") looks something like drg.stead.page.

Here in this example, drg can be replaced by your initials, your first name, your full name, or whatever you want. We recommend using your full name or your initials. That will make your URL look professional on your business cards.

Since Stead is so new, most of the good website addresses are still available. That won't be true for long.

What to Put on Your Author Website When You Have No Books Yet

On social media there's a movement called "Build in Public" where people share their personal journeys starting a business even before the business is open to customers.

Deciding to write a book for the first time is deciding to start a new business. You should be building in public as an author even before your first book is out. In this case it means building your audience through your web presence and mailing list.

Start with putting your bio on your website, drawing from your life story. Make it relevant to the genre you're writing in if you can, though if it's totally irrelevant don't let that stop you. It's better to put something like "Audrey works by day as a programmer, and writes epic fantasy by night in her free time." if you don't know what to write.

Then just write about your writing journey as often as you can. Aim to post an article or note each week. It can be an excerpt of what you wrote that week, such as a scene you loved or even a weird sentence you created that has never existed before.

The final piece you need for your author website is a way to sign up for your mailing list. We have SendFox and EmailOctopus integrations for that, though you can also use a Google Form or TypeForm or Tally form or any form tool you want if you want to start more simply.

Don't worry if any of this sounds complicated, though. We can help you set it up on a call together, and it's okay if you're a total newbie who doesn't understand this stuff yet.

Build your first author website, with a private setup session included. See plans from $15/month.