Here’s a number worth sitting with: authors pulling in $10,000 or more a month average over 18,000 email subscribers, according to Written Word Media’s 2025 indie author survey. Not followers. Subscribers. And that list didn’t come from Amazon, it came from writers who bothered to build something they actually own.<\/p>\n
That’s really what this post is about. Ten things your author website needs if you want it to do real work for you: bring in readers, sell books, and stick around as your career grows instead of falling apart the first time a platform changes its rules. Doesn’t matter if you’re two weeks from your debut launch or five books deep, and it works the same whether you’re writing for the US market, the UK, or both.<\/p>\n
Let’s be blunt about it. Social media is borrowed space. You don’t own your followers, and you definitely don’t own the readers who found you through an Amazon search box. One algorithm update and your reach halves overnight. One account flag and years of posts disappear. It happens more often than anyone likes to admit.<\/p>\n
A website is different because it’s yours. It has your own domain, so you’re not relying on platforms like Meta, TikTok, or Amazon that can change their rules at any time. People discover authors in many ways these days. Some find them through TikTok, Google, Goodreads, podcasts, or even word of mouth. A website gives all those readers one place to go. It’s your online home where they can see your books, join your mailing list, and learn more about you.<\/p>\n
There’s a number that backs this up too. Amazon’s cut of overall author revenue slipped from 91% in 2023 to 83% in 2025, which tells you something: more writers are quietly building direct relationships with readers instead of renting them from a marketplace. If that’s the direction you want to head, professional author website design services<\/a> are the obvious starting point. And if you want a longer read on the subject, Jane Friedman’s guide to author websites<\/a> is genuinely one of the better ones out there.<\/p>\n Ten elements. Miss one and you’re probably losing readers, subscribers, or sales somewhere without realizing it.<\/p>\n Most people decide within a few seconds whether they want to stay on a website or leave. That’s why your homepage should quickly tell them who you are, what kind of books you write, and where they should go next. Add your name, a clear professional photo instead of a blurry selfie, your genre, your latest book cover, and one clear button or link for visitors to click. Don’t overcrowd the page with too many options. A simple menu is much easier to use, and if there are too many tabs, visitors can end up feeling confused.<\/p>\n Not a shared paragraph on a \u201cmy books\u201d tab, an actual page per title. Cover, subtitle, a blurb written for readers rather than acquisitions editors, buy links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org. Reviews if you’ve got them. And if it’s series fiction, spell out the reading order clearly, because nothing frustrates a new reader faster than guessing where to start.<\/p>\n This is usually your second most visited page, and people underestimate how much it matters. Agents check it. Journalists check it. Readers check it before they buy. Third person if you want it to feel more polished, first person if you want it to feel more like you. Either way, real photo, real credentials, and one detail that makes you sound like a person instead of a bio generator.<\/p>\n Your email list is the one asset that’s genuinely yours, and most readers won’t sign up the first time they see the form, they need to see it three, four, maybe five times before it clicks. So put it in your homepage hero, your footer, every book page, your blog. Offer something for it: a short story, a sample chapter, whatever fits your genre. Hook it into ConvertKit, Mailchimp, MailerLite, doesn’t matter which. What matters is the return, email marketing pulls in $36 to $42 for every dollar spent, per Litmus’s research on email ROI<\/a>, which makes it hard to justify skipping.<\/p>\n A simple contact form keeps your inbox from drowning in spam while still letting readers, press, or event organizers get in touch. Name, email, message, that’s plenty. Don’t ask for a phone number upfront; nobody’s giving you that on a first contact. If you do any media or speaking work, add a press page too: high-res headshot, downloadable cover files, a short bio and a longer one, your topics, links to anything you’ve already done.<\/p>\n A blog that gets touched now and then keeps your site from going stale in Google’s eyes, and it gives readers a reason to check back between books. You don’t need weekly posts, honestly, consistency matters more than frequency. Writing notes, research tangents, genre recommendations, reader questions, launch news. If full posts feel like too much, a lighter news section does the job too, and it ties nicely into a broader book marketing<\/a> approach.<\/p>\n Over 60% of traffic is mobile now, and Google ranks based on your mobile version first, not your desktop one. If someone has to pinch and zoom just to read a paragraph, they’re gone before they even see your books. Everything needs to load fast and look clean on a small screen, Google’s mobile-first indexing guidelines<\/a> spell this out directly, and the data backs it: cross three seconds of load time and you’ve lost most of your visitors already.<\/p>\n A gorgeous site nobody can find is basically pointless. Title tags, meta descriptions, proper heading structure, alt text on images, clean URLs, a sitemap you’ve actually submitted. Your name and genre should appear naturally across your pages, not stuffed in awkwardly, just present the way it would be if a person wrote it. This is what lets someone searching for you, or your genre, or your books, actually land on your site instead of someone else’s.<\/p>\n Readers listen to other readers more than they listen to marketing copy, full stop. Reviews, blurbs from fellow authors, star ratings, press mentions, put them somewhere visible, especially on your homepage and book pages. Treat quotes like a back cover would: short, specific, credited. Nonfiction writers, this goes for you too, testimonials from clients or event hosts carry just as much weight as reader reviews do for fiction.<\/p>\n You can’t improve what you’re not tracking. Google Analytics 4 is free, takes ten minutes to set up, and shows you where traffic comes from and where people bail. Search Console fills in the rest, which searches bring people in, what’s technically broken. Set both up before launch. Trying to backfill months of missing data later is not fun.<\/p>\n Once the ten basics are covered, there’s room to build further. An events page for signings and festivals. A direct storefront, Shopify, WooCommerce, Payhip, for readers who want signed copies straight from you; roughly 30% of authors are already selling direct, and another 30% say they’re planning to start soon. A book club page with discussion guides, especially useful if you write fiction or kids’ books. Maybe a launch team or VIP page to rally your most engaged readers around early reviews. None of it replaces the core ten, but it pairs well with real author branding<\/a> work once you’re ready to expand.<\/p>\n Do I really need a website?<\/b> Yes, honestly. Social platforms rewrite their own rules constantly, and Amazon still owns your audience, not you. A website on your own domain is the one thing online that’s entirely yours, a permanent home base rather than a rented one.<\/p>\n What pages does it need, at minimum?<\/b> Homepage, About page, a page for each book, a contact form, and an email signup. Everything else, blog, media kit, events page, direct sales, can come later as things grow. Better to launch lean than to launch with a dozen empty placeholder pages.<\/p>\n WordPress or Squarespace?<\/b> Honestly, either. WordPress gives you more control long-term, especially useful once you’ve got a few books out. Squarespace is easier to run solo and looks sharp without much technical fuss. Pick whichever you’ll actually keep up with, a Squarespace site you maintain beats a WordPress site you abandon.<\/p>\n What does it cost?<\/b> A basic self-built site runs somewhere between $150 and $500 a year for hosting and platform fees. Hiring a designer or agency for something custom typically lands between $1,500 and $5,000, depending on how many pages and features you want. Pricing’s roughly similar whether you’re in the US or UK.<\/p>\n Should it exist before my book comes out?<\/b> Ideally, yes. Building it early gives Google time to index everything and gives you a head start on your email list before launch day arrives. Even a bare-bones one-pager with your name, genre, and a signup form beats scrambling to throw something together after the book’s already live.<\/p>\n An author website isn’t optional anymore, it’s the thing everything else in your career gets built on top of. The Writers Central builds author websites for writers across the US and UK: mobile-first, SEO-ready, designed for people who want more readers and more sales, not just a pretty homepage that does nothing.<\/p>\n Book a free consultation<\/a> to get started, or take a look at our author website design services<\/a> directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s a number worth sitting with: authors pulling in $10,000 or more a month average over 18,000 email subscribers, according to Written Word Media’s 2025 indie author survey. Not followers. Subscribers. And that list didn’t come from Amazon, it came from writers who bothered to build something they actually own. That’s really what this post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":195,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewriterscentral.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The 10-Point Checklist<\/h2>\n
1. A homepage that actually says something<\/h3>\n
2. Its own page for every single book<\/h3>\n
3. An About page that earns trust<\/h3>\n
4. Newsletter signup, everywhere<\/h3>\n
5. A way to actually reach you<\/h3>\n
6. Somewhere to actually blog<\/h3>\n
7. A site that works on a phone<\/h3>\n
8. The unglamorous SEO stuff<\/h3>\n
9. Proof other people trust you<\/h3>\n
10. Numbers you actually look at<\/h3>\n
A Few Extras Worth Adding Later<\/h2>\n
Questions Authors Actually Ask<\/h2>\n
Where to Go From Here<\/h2>\n