You’ve written the book, you’ve decided how you’ll publish it, and now you’re ready to start making sales.

Somewhere along the line, you’ve heard you need a platform. So you hop on social media, you build an email list, but one thing is still missing: you need a website.

But you don’t know where to begin. After all, every website you’ve ever seen has been in its completed form. How do you choose how to create one? How do you decide what to put on it? What does it really need to have to be effective?

As with all things book marketing, the answer is “it depends.”

It depends on many things, but mostly it depends on these:

1. How tech savvy are you?
2. What does you budget allow for?
3. What is the goal of your website?

I’m going to assume, because you’ve found my blog and are looking into how to create your own website, you’re not very tech savvy. You probably don’t know how to write the code to create a website that can live online, and even if you did, you wouldn’t know how to do much beyond basic HTML.

I’m also going to assume that you’re trying to make money, not spend it unnecessarily. So I’m going to assume your budget is within the $0-20 range. (At the end of this article I’ll go over some of the more expensive options and their benefits.)

Next, let’s determine your goal. Before you can create a website that will suit your needs, you need to know what those needs are.

• Do you want to blog? (I always recommend this, but it’s not strictly necessary.)
• Do you want to sell directly from your website? (This will cost you a bit more but can be quite lucrative if you do it well.)
• Do you want to showcase your own photography?
• Do you want your website to be more text-heavy?

Now. Let’s go over the easiest options to create your own website from scratch.

Wix, WordPress, Weebly, Squarespace, and BlueHost

All of these offer varying levels of support and creative control. They have their own benefits and their own drawbacks. Depending on your goals and your own aesthetic choices, you’ll like some themes better than others.

Wix is a DIY website builder using a simple to use drag and drop interface. What you see is (usually) what you get with Wix. Things get a little clunky when you’re working on a site to be seen in Mobile viewing, but that’s to be expected (and is applicable across the board.)

They offer a free plan, so long as you don’t want your own custom domain, and offer beautiful, powerful, robust multi-page or single-scroll websites in minutes.

They do get fairly pricy once you need more than the free plan can offer, and if you want to use your own domain you’ll need to upgrade eventually. But to get you started, they’re a fantastic website.

WordPress is a DIY website builder that offers two low-tier cost options–free or personal. You can either begin with some additional benefits for $4 a month or you can camp out in the free zone for as long as you need.

They offer you a free domain name for a year, after which you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to keep the domain name.

They excel when it comes to text-heavy websites, and have a nearly-intuitive block design style that lets you format your website nicely in a way that will reflow to any screen size without issue. Unless you want to use photos. Then things get a little more tricky. They are unmatched in their blogging capabilities, but they fall short in other areas and most websites created with WordPress end up looking the same as each other. Which isn’t bad, necessarily, because they have a beautiful standard layout. But you won’t stand out from the crowd.

Weebly is a DIY website builder that offers a simple design interface at all levels, AND offers e-commerce right of the bat with the free level. This is unique. None of the other web hosters offer this at a free level. If you want to sell your own books directly to readers from the get-go, this may be the best starting point for you.

They integrate with Square, a simple to use Point of Sale system. SquareSpace, another DIY budget-friendly website builder also uses Square, however they lack customizable options.

Lastly, BlueHost may be the way to go if you want your own business email to accompany your domain. If you’d like to have an info@yourname.com email address, BlueHost can make that happen. They integrate with WordPress to make your website building even easier.

Once you decide which builder is best for you, or, after all these options, you decide you’d rather just hire an expert and get it over with, you need to know what to put on the website.

Most effective author websites have these items:

1. Home
2. About the Author
3. Books
4. Individual Book Pages
5. Contact
6. Social Media Links
7. Email List Subscription Form
8. News and Upcoming Events

You’ll notice a blog isn’t directly noted there. That’s because, in many cases, you can use your blog’s feature to simplify much of what you need to provide.

A blog can be used to create individual book pages, event pages, host press releases, share thoughts on recent reads or share your thoughts from your life.

As a tool, a blog post will almost always perform better than a standard website page. If creating a blog with a home page and an about page works best for you, that may be exactly the way to go!

Almost everything can be started for free, but often there is an additional cost when you want expanded capabilities.

Online Stores:

Most of the time, unless you create your website with Weebly, having an eCommerce option on your site is going to cost around $30 per month. (This is the case for WooCommerce, WordPress’s integration, and Wix’s eCommerce integration.)

Square and Weebly seem to be the only places where you can do this for free, but some of the logistics still get a little iffy. As with most things, there’s a high likelihood of an up-charge. It is very difficult to make money without spending money.

Custom Domains:

Many website builders will let you buy a domain straight from them, however, that is usually not the cheapest option. It’s worth it to shop around a little and figure out how to connect a domain name you already own, as that will likely save you some money in the long run.

That’s it! Now you’re ready to go build a stellar author website and load it up with all the things you’ll need to be found online.

Do you have a question you’d like answered on this blog? Send me a note and I’ll see what I can do.

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