Author Websites

How authors can blog successfully for long-term platform and book marketing efforts, with tips for online writing, strong headlines, and good SEO.

I strongly advocate all authors start and maintain a website as part of their long-term marketing efforts and ongoing platform development. But it's an intimidating project because so few authors have been in a position to create, manage, or oversee websites. Where do you even begin?

This post was first published in 2012 and is regularly updated. First things first: an author's website, whether it gets

One of the easiest ways for an author to get a site up and running is to use Blogger or

We are storytellers, are we not? Let’s use that skill to our advantage when building the language of our websites to help readers find us.

Both Tertulia and BookBub now offer author website building services. How do they compare?

Unlike its competitors, the service requires only an ISBN and template choice to create a site in under a minute.

The average visitor spends on average 54 seconds on a webpage. Here are some tips to help turn visitors into readers, buyers, or subscribers.

A little planning and reflection will help your website be a project you sustain, rather than discard like a half-baked draft.

Many writers are told to blog or send an email newsletter without much idea of how to approach it. Here are the most common mistakes they make.

If you plan to pursue writing as a professional, long-term career, I recommend starting and maintaining an author website even if you’re unpublished.

For a platform that powers a quarter of the websites in the world, Wordpress is surprisingly insecure. The default settings leave a site open to being hacked a half-dozen different ways.

Whether you’re an emerging author or one that is well-established, it can be challenging to figure out what belongs on your website's homepage and what to say about yourself on the front door to your online presence.

Plugins are one of the most wonderful and useful things about Wordpress. Here are some of my favorites for writers.

Getting traction for your online presence—especially a new blog—can feel like an impossible task when you're an unknown writer. But it can be done.

Pop-ups have long been despited by the Internet world, but the difficulty is: They work. Here's how to implement them in a way that won't annoy visitors.

Wondering why you don't have more blog traffic—or if it's worthwhile to continue your blogging effort? Here are the mistakes that commonly afflict authors.

If you’re considering WordPress as your platform of choice, here’s what you should know as you prepare to build on it.

Author Gigi Rosenberg describes how she redesigned and relaunched her author website primarily on her own, only hiring assistance at the end.

3 ways to avoid long-term pain and suffering if you're preparing to launch your first author website.

Here are 10 questions to ask before you choose a Wordpress theme for your site.

by Aurélien Bellanger Today's interview is by contributing writer Kristen Tsetsi (@ktsetsi), who does every-other-Wednesday interviews for the 5 On

If you have a Wordpress-based site, then you know that one of the first choices you have to make (and

Note from Jane: Today’s guest post is by Simone Collins (@SimoneHCollins) at ArtCorgi. See her earlier post on The Advantages

by Tim Dorr / Flickr When it comes to establishing your author website, one of the more confusing topics is