Do you like to read? We don’t mean short blog posts or fashion articles in glossy magazines. Now we are speaking about real literature written by talented authors. What genre do you prefer? Science fiction, fantasy, classical novels, horror stories or maybe light reading…
Tastes differ; however, books accompany us from the very first moments of our life. We always remember fairy tales our mother read us before going to sleep. Then, during long periods of education, books continued to be our faithful friends prompting us answers to the questions of any complexity. As we grow older we still find peace, thrills, information or whatever we search for at any given moment.
Image credit: Bigstockphoto
Best Book Author Websites
The author of this post must confess that she is a passionate reader. That’s why she decided to showcase the most amazing authors’ websites to draw the web community’s attention to reading in general and their works in particular. But there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me on the way. It turned out that there are very few really modern, attractive writers’ sites encouraging visitors for further investigation. From my viewpoint authors, together with web developers, should change this situation, as its positive outcome will be beneficial for both parties.
So far, the authors have quite opposite opinions as to personal websites. Some of them view the website as a way of promotion, vanity satisfaction, something that can feature the things they are proud of, a good means of connecting with fans and publishers. It’s really difficult to argue the fact that if writing is your business, and you want to be taken as a professional, you should have an awesome site containing all essential information about you and your books as well.
Another category of authors consider websites as nothing but time-suckers consuming their efforts on content updating and their money on design and functionality improvement. Such kinds of writers are absolutely satisfied with their social media accounts, where they can post their news, communicate with fans without any considerable time, money and effort investments.
Image credit: Bigstockphoto
Both categories of authors have sense; nevertheless, we believe that social media presence alone has one huge drawback. The matter is that you have no total control over your profile design and functional features, you have no individuality; it does not reveal your personality and single you out among the others. Moreover, whether you like it or not, social media account will never look serious enough for the publisher, which is important, if a writer wants to get money for the job and become popular someday.
You know what? If you are an author, who ranked yourself among website opponents, but changed your mind and decided to create a trendy, appealing website, reflecting your personality and conveying your thoughts to the readers, we have some useful tips that will help you succeed.
Image credit: Bigstockphoto
- Do it well. By this statement we mean that an amateur design will bring more harm than benefits to your business.
- Build your website on greatly SEO optimized platform. This is a kind of guarantee that your readers will find information they want to know about you.
- Use responsive design. It’s a must-have nowadays. Take care of your readers; don’t make them stick to desktop computers to know the latest news about your books. Let them do this from any mobile device they have at hand.
- Choose a platform that allows easy and quick update (maybe WordPress). Brief, effortless maintenance possibility will save your time and let you keep your website always up-to-date and interesting for users.
- Update your content on regular bases. This will make fans visit your site more often to check if there is anything new cooked up for them here.
- Integrate it with your social profiles, so that the visitors were able to get there in one click and share info about you with their friends. Please take care about Google + connections, as your image will appear next to the posts in Google search results, which will significantly boost the click-throughs.
- Offer visitors to sign-up for an email newsletter. It’s a smart marketing move, which can multiply your income.
- Focus on quality content. This aspect is much more important than the design itself. Undoubtedly, an experienced designer will always find the way to highlight your text, but it should be interesting for the user.
- Integrate a blog into your website. Firstly, this will double your traffic and secondly, this will raise your search engine rankings.
- Concentrate on your readers’ satisfaction. To tell you the truth, nobody cares about you. An average user wants to know how he/she can benefit from visiting your website. Different authors use various techniques to make their sites valuable for the visitors (for instance, you may include tips, guides, podcasts, videos, deleted scenes, character histories, photos of their prototypes, etc., everything depends on your writing genre).
- Be unique. Your website should have something remarkable, a zest that singles it out from the crowd. Imagine what it can be. What makes your books special? Maybe it’s your sense of humor, in-depth scientific approach or mazy plots, keeping readers in constant tension. Apply these abilities to your website and readers will take the bait.
- It’s better to craft your website not for everybody in general, but for the audience that reads your books. For example, it doesn’t make sense to cast pearls before men if you write romantic love stories for housewives.
- Make your website work for the main goal you want to reach. The aims can be different: to sell books, to promote yourself over the internet, to build stronger connections with your readers and so on. Of course the goal will influence website design. In any case, it’s better to know your dream destination; otherwise you will never get there.
We sincerely hope that these quick tips will help authors understand the necessity of having a personal page in addition to social media accounts and let them approach its creation properly. The right approach always saves us from mistakes and headaches. Of course, we have showcased the best examples of writers’ sites for your inspiration below. Some of them are real masterpieces, but we are sure that very soon, yours will look and run even better.
Lauren Oliver
Jay Asher
Seth Godin
Edward Achorn
JK Rowling
Bernard Cornwell
Antony Beevor
Gillian Flynn
Marcel Theroux
Dan Brown
Rachael King
Haruki Murakami
Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Lauren Weisberger
Teri Coyne
Chris Van Allsburg
Cassandra Clare
Nicole Krauss
Nicci French
Ian Fleming
Antoine de Saint Exupery
Kathy Reichs
Lesley M.M. Blume
Rick Riordan
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Ted Dekker
Patricia Cornwell
Philippa Gregory
Conclusion
Guys, how did you like our tips and authors’ websites collection? Which of them do you consider the most memorable? Do you agree that it’s really essential for any writer to have his/her personal website apart from social media accounts? Maybe you have more useful tips on better authors’ websites creation or more impressive examples of them. We would be happy to hear back from you soon. Please, leave your feedback in the comments section.
