Just to recap, Part 1 focused on everything that I thought was absolutely essential to be on an author’s website – the kind of stuff readers are going to be looking for and the kind of stuff that will give you the best chance of promoting your books to potential readers.
For this second part, I want to talk briefly about some of the other considerations you need to take into account when you’re building (or buying) your author website. Apologies in advance, because some of this stuff is more technical than the stuff in the previous part, but it’s stuff you can check up on, and if it needs fixing, well, it should be fairly easy to find a web designer who can handle it for you.
Responsive Design
Suppose you’re hanging out with friends in real life, rather than online, and someone mentions a book or an author. It/they sounds/sound interesting, and you figure you’ll find out more. You whip out your phone and look them up. Maybe you look on Amazon or Goodreads, and that’s all good, because you’ll get a good experience.
But suppose you look on the author’s website, because you’re after more info than either of those sites can give you. And when you get to that author’s website, you can’t read it. The whole giant website is squeezed into your phone’s screen. You have to zoom in enormously then swipe back and forth for every line.
What a pain. Unless you’re really determined, you might give up. I certainly have. Maybe you’ll remember to check later at home, or maybe, like me again, you’ll forget. You might have bought that book or become a fan of the author’s for life, but you didn’t because their website doesn’t work properly on a phone and you gave up. Game over.
Increasingly, people are using phones and tablets to access the web. Some people don’t have a desktop or laptop at all anymore, and that trend is only going to increase. Depending on your demographic, most of your readers may already prefer to look at websites on their phones or tablets.
If your website isn’t as good or better on a phone screen, you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice.
There are two strategies you can take to deal with this. (Big companies like Amazon will often run two or more completely different sites for mobile and desktop, but there’s no need for you to do this).
Mobile Theme
First up, if you’re using WordPress (and probably some other systems) you can install a separate mobile ‘theme’ or plugin that will detect if a mobile device is being used and give a simple, smaller version of your website.
This solution is definitely better than nothing, but it tends to lead to functional and bland websites rather than brilliant ones on phones. Still, it’s a solution you can use right away and it will help.
Responsive Design
The better solution if you’re starting a new website is to use what’s known as ‘responsive design’. This website you’re looking at now (patricksamphire.com) uses responsive design. If you’re looking at it on a laptop or desktop, resize your browser window (by grabbing hold of the bottom right corner and dragging it). You’ll notice that, as you make the web browser smaller or larger, a lot of things change. The header changes. The navigation changes. The layout of the page changes. The size of the images changes. All these changes are designed to make the website work as well as possible for screens of all different sizes.
Here are some screenshots of the homepage on a phone, an iPad and a laptop.
First up, here’s what it looks like from a relatively modern phone (click for larger photo):
Screenshot from Nexus 4 phone.
Next up, here’s a second generation iPad held vertically.
Screenshot from iPad held vertically.
Then the same iPad held horizontally – with more horizontal space there’s room for the navigation to show up.
Screenshot from iPad held horizontally.
Then finally on a laptop:
Screenshot from 13 inch MacBook Pro.
As you can see, no matter what device you’re using to look at the website, you’ll get the same content but a layout and design that’s suited to the way you’re looking at it. Lower down on the page, you’ll notice that the number and size of the columns also changes.
Light and Fast
No matter how small or big your website is, it needs to load quickly for people who visit it. If you make them hang around staring at a blank screen, a lot of them will leave. How quickly? Ideally, you’d want to get your website to load in one second, but that’s not always realistic for a smaller site, so you should aim for two seconds. If your website is taking ten seconds, you’ve got problems.
There are a lot of technical factors that go into making your website fast, and sadly many web designers don’t seem to know what these are or can’t be bothered to deal with them, and it may be hard to tell by just looking at their portfolios whether designers really know what they’re doing in terms of fast and efficient websites or not.
The main things that will slow your website down are:
Too many and too large images, including background or header images
Too many javascript files being loaded (which can come from too many plugins, social media sharing buttons, and bad web development)
A slow web host
How far your visitor is from your web server
Dealing with these one at a time:
Images: make sure that you crop or resize images to the correct size before you upload them, and make sure you optimise them. If you don’t know how to optimise images and you’re using WordPress, install the Smush.it plugin, which will help compress the image.
Javascript: don’t use social media sharing plugins (see Part 1 of this series for details), disable and remove any unnecessary plugins, and make sure your theme is well constructed.
Web host: most of you will be using shared web hosting. To be honest, you’re in a bit of a lottery there, because if you share a server with someone who is using it heavily, the server will be slower. You basically have the choice of moving to a faster (and more expensive) hosting provider or dealing with the one you’ve got. And while you can’t do much about other users overloading your server, you can at least ensure that your own website doesn’t make too many demands on the server. Using caching plugins and maybe even a Content Delivery Network (cdn) will speed things up a lot. This website runs on a shared hosting plan, and it generally manages to be pretty quick. But sometimes, on a shared hosting plan, it’s just going to be slow. You have to decide how much money is worth spending. Whatever you do, though, don’t use a free hosting provider (an exception would be using the wordpress.com or blogspot free blogs).
How far away: Make sure you host your website in the country from which you expect to get most of your visitors. A shorter distance between the web host and the visitor will mean a quicker delivery of the content. A Content Delivery Network will also help overcome issues related to distance from the server by storing copies of your website on different servers around the world.
How Do You Know How Fast Your Website Is?
There are various services available online that will measure the speed of your site and give you an analysis of what is slowing it down. My personal favourite is GTmetrix. It will tell you the page load time, the total size of the page, and a whole bunch of other information about what is slowing down the site.
Your aim should be:
Page load time: around 2 seconds or less. Total page size: ideally less than 500KB, but absolutely never more than 1MB. The version of your website that is delivered to a mobile phone should be smaller than the one going to desktops.
For comparison, I just ran this website homepage through GTmetrix, and these are the results I got (for the full-sized version of the website):
Page load time: 2.27s Total page size: 443KB
So, not as fast as I would ideally like, but as I said, when you’re on shared hosting, you can’t always control how fast the server will respond. When I look closer at where the delay is coming from, it’s down to the speed of the server (and, I’ve noticed, over the last few days, my website hasn’t been responding as fast as normal).
Luckily, a lot of the files that are slowing down my website on first visit (like the stylesheet) will be cached by the browser and subsequent pages will be faster.
Another service you can use to test how long your website takes to load is Pingdom.
If your website is running too slow, ask your web designer or developer to look into it. There’s almost certainly something that can be done to speed it up. That way you’ll get more visitors and they’ll stay longer.
Readable
Okay, suppose that someone has found their way onto your website. It loaded quickly and fitted your phone’s screen nicely.
Now all your visitor has to do is read it, right?
And that’s where problems come in far too often.
Here’s what you must have if your website is going to be readable:
Large text – the text on this website is about as small as you should ever have.
A clean simple font – nothing fancy or curly or difficult to read. Just because a font is readable on your screen doesn’t mean it will be on every computer. Different operating systems and different browsers render fonts differently, and sometimes badly. Don’t just grab a font you like from google fonts or a free fonts site. Choose something widespread, professional, and simple (many of these are free).
Dark text on a light background – definitely not light text on a dark background. Dark backgrounds work on things like photography sites where there are lots of pictures and not much text, but on a site that has any significant amount of text (that is, more than a paragraph or two per page), then it’ll be almost unreadable for many, many visitors, and they won’t strain their eyes to try.
Clear Navigation and Structure
You need some form of navigation if people are going to find their way around your website, but navigation is actually quite difficult to get right. Here are a few guidelines to help you:
The main (top level) navigation should contain six or seven items, tops, including ‘Home’. If you offer more, people’s eyes will skip over the items or they will click something more or less at random.
You need to match the navigation items to what your visitors expect. For example, if you write fiction, your visitors are most likely to be looking for a main navigation item with the text ‘books’ or ‘novels’ or something similar. An item like ‘bibliography’ is less helpful, unless you’re writing for an academic audience. Likewise, if you use the title of your book or series, unless you are really famous, no one will know what you’re talking about. Furthermore, if you bury the link to your books as a subsection under some other heading like ‘about’ or ‘biography’, it won’t lead people to your books easily.
‘Dropdown menus’, where you hover a cursor over a menu to get other items to appear are also a bad idea. People often find them difficult or impossible to use, and they can be a problem on touch screens.
Sometimes people include too many navigation items at the top level because they have heard of the ‘three click rule’ – that you must never make anyone click more than three times to get to any part of your website. Let’s be clear about this. There is no such rule. There never was any evidence to suggest that it mattered. Yes, don’t make people click on things unnecessarily without getting anywhere, but as long as you are being interesting, people will follow you as far as they need to.
The structure of the website, that is, how the pages fit together with each other internally doesn’t have to match the structure of the navigation, but you’ll find it easier if it does.
Okay, folks, that’s it.
Like I said, sorry some parts of this are a bit technical and dense in places. But you should be able at least to check whether your website adapts to different sized screens and whether it loads quickly, and if doesn’t, someone should be able to help you fix that.
If you’ve got any questions, please do feel free to ask them below or on Twitter.
If you’re interested in my web design work (or, for that matter, my ebook design work), please drop over to my other website at 50SecondsNorth.com.
Your author website is your home, your shop window, and your little corner of your favourite café where you can hang out. It’s where you can meet your readers and really give them what they want and need from you. More than anything, it’s the one place where you have full control over how you portray yourself, how you interact with readers and potential readers, and how you can get people to actually be interested in your books and stories.
Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, whatever, these are all great. But in every one of them, you are at the mercy of someone else, some big corporation with its own interests. You don’t control the your data on these sites, nor who can access it, nor how. Their websites can change or disappear on a whim. They are ephemeral. Ask yourself: if you found yourself thrown off Facebook or Twitter tomorrow, how easy would it be to re-establish contact with all the people who followed you?
Your website, however, is yours. That means you need to get it right.
A few months ago, I redesigned this website. I have a book coming out in 2015 (Secrets of the Dragon Tomb) and my website was … well, let’s just say that if you’d burned it, jumped up and down on it, and put it through a blender, it couldn’t have been much worse. It certainly didn’t do the job.
Before I started, I spent a lot of time talking to readers and writers about what they wanted to see in an author’s website, and I spent a lot of time just surfing around, looking at author websites and figuring out what they did right and what they did wrong.
Whether you’re self-publishing your book or you’re being traditionally published, here’s what your author website needs:
Your books…
Yes, it should be obvious. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you’d be surprised at the number of author websites that don’t even list some of their more recent books. If you want people to buy your books, they have to know those books exist.
Here’s what you should have for every single book you’ve published (and for ones coming out soon):
Title
Well, duh.
Cover
Aren't you more likely to notice this cover than just the text?
Covers sell books, even if we don’t think they should. They grab attention on a page that would otherwise be dull text, and they tell readers at a glance what type of book it is.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of recognition. The more places that people see your cover, the more likely it is to spark some recognition in them. They may not know why they recognize it, but that recognition leads to interest simply by itself, and the more it’s reinforced, the more likely someone is to develop interest.
This is the same reason why a bad review is better than no review at all; someone might not remember that the review was bad, but they will remember the title or cover, or your name.
Publisher
If you’re traditionally published, give the full imprint and publisher. For Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, I list “Christy Ottaviano Books | Henry Holt | Macmillan”. If you’re self-published, use whatever you’d put as your publisher on Amazon. If that’s just your name, that’s fine. The name of the publisher makes it easier to order your book.
ISBN
Your ISBN is the unique identification number for your book. You may share a title or a name with another book or author, but no one else will share your ISBN. Make it easy for librarians and booksellers to order your book by using this. Use your ISBN-13 if you have one.
Different editions will have different ISBNs. As you’re mainly including the number to help people order your book, if you only want to list one, use the one for the edition that you want people to order.
Genre
Be explicit here. Young Adult Contemporary. Historical Fantasy. Whatever. Yeah, yeah, I know your book transcends genre. But do it anyway.
Publication Date
This is particularly important for any forthcoming books, but quite helpful for your backlist, too.
Book Description
Think of this as being similar to the jacket copy on your book. This may be the first thing that a potential reader sees about your book, so you need to hook them.
Don’t, though, just re-use the jacket copy or the Goodreads / Amazon description of your book.
Links to where you can buy or preorder the book
Don’t give a reader the chance to forget your book. If they’re interested, and they want the book, give them a chance to buy it right now.
Use a ‘buy’ button or a list of links. While it’s good to give a few options for the main stores (e.g., Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes and Noble), don’t overdo it. If you offer too many choices, the chances are your reader’s eyes will glaze over.
A buy button is a clear and obvious way to let people buy your book.
But a list of links works nicely too.
Book Extract
If people like the cover, and they like the description, then they’re going to want to see if they’re actually going to like your book. In a bookstore, they can flip your book open and read the opening. Give them the same opportunity on your website, and make it easy.
The first few chapters is an excellent sample to offer. Don’t just make it available as a PDF to download, though, because that’s a pain for readers, and they may well not bother. Make the sample a proper web page.
Testimonials
In other words, someone saying how utterly fantastic your book is.
This kind of social proof actually works. And it doesn’t particularly matter who it’s from. Just because you can’t get Stephen King or JK Rowling to blurb your book doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother. Even a quote from someone everyone knows is your best friend will work.
Reader / Discussion Guides (Optional)
Useful for school discussions and book groups.
Series Information
If you are writing a series, it is absolutely essential that you make the order of the books completely clear. It’s not always easy to tell from the books themselves (some publishers seem to delight in making it impossible to work out which book comes in what order), and it’s even harder on Amazon. Make it easy!
A Proper Homepage / Frontpage
Your homepage should not be your blog, and it should not be a ‘splash’ page.
In a high proportion of cases, your homepage is the first thing a visitor is going to see. They might know absolutely nothing about you at all.
Suppose someone knows nothing about you and they land on your homepage. Now suppose that homepage is your blog.
Look at your last few blog entries. Would you be totally, 100% happy that the first thing (and maybe the only thing) a potential reader sees about you is one of those blog entries? Does that blog entry tell the visitor who you are and what you write? Does it tell the visitor about your new book? Is it, in fact, a rant about root vegetables?
Your blog is probably not what you want to lead with.
Splash pages used to be pretty popular, but I really thought we were done with them. They never were a good idea. A splash page is a homepage that basically either has a big graphic or picture with an ‘Enter’ button or a list of links to main parts of the site.
It’s a bad idea because it’s a wasted opportunity. These new visitors who don’t know much or anything about you, you don’t have them for long. If they’re just curious, you’ve got very little time to hook them. The first thing they see should be either about you or about your book. It shouldn’t just be a pretty picture. Also, a lot of your visitors may now be using mobile devices. Are they really going to be happy if you make them download a gigantic image without getting what they’re looking for?
So, what should be on your homepage?
Your Latest Book
Including, in summary at least, most of the stuff from the ‘books’ section, above.
Emphasise your latest book on the homepage.
Forthcoming Book
With a publication date!
If you have a forthcoming book as well as a current one, include that too. Let readers know you’ve got more coming up!
Whether this or your current book gets higher emphasis will depend on how close to release date your next books is.
Julie James was emphasising her forthcoming book at the time I took this shot, because it was out shortly.
A brief biography
A brief bio for the homepage.
Not a full biography, but a brief introduction, preferably with a photo. Remember, not everyone knows who you are, and this may be the one page where you get a chance to introduce yourself before they zoom off to look at videos of amusing cats and photos of Tom Hiddleston.
Your latest blog entry (if you have a blog)
Yes, I said don’t make your front page your blog, but there’s nothing wrong with having an excerpt from your latest blog entry on your front page. Stick to about 50 words and possibly an image, and you’ll be fine. This way you give visitors a taste that they can follow up, but you don’t get in the way of the primary purpose of the front page, which is to introduce you and your book(s).
It also lets readers know that you do actually update your website. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming across an author website that hasn’t been updated for years. (Well, there is, but, you know, exaggerating for effect and all that…)
A Testimonial
As I said, ‘social proof’ is important, and you should try to get a good quote in pretty early on. That someone liked your book and is willing to say so publicly will at least give your potential readers a reason to look further.
Space for highlighting other content
From time-to-time there’s going to be something you want to promote on your website. A competition, for example, or a piece of important news. Whatever. If you have a space (or spaces) already set aside for that, you won’t have to shoehorn it in awkwardly when it does come up.
Forthcoming Event and Latest News
I’ll talk about these more later, but if you have separate Events and News sections, then including one of each (in summary) on the front page is a good idea.
Social Media Links
Social media links in the header? Lovely.
Every page on your website should have links to whatever social media platforms you use. Websites are good for presenting information, and blogs are good for keeping people in the loop and starting conversations, but if people want to interact with you more (and you want them to, right?) then social media is where you’re going to do it. Only include them if you actually use those platforms, though. For example, I have a Google+ profile, but I never, ever use Google+, so I don’t link to it. I’m not going to be interacting with anyone there.
Put the links in the header, sidebar or footer of each page. Just putting them on your ‘contact’ page probably isn’t going to do much good.
Don’t overdo it, though. Where do you want to actually want to interact with me? If you’re on a dozen different platforms, don’t list all of them. Direct me to where you want me. Three or four is good. Why not more? Too much choice can overwhelm people, at which point they’ll either click something random or not click at all.
About Me
There are probably two main reasons that people are coming to your website (discounting people who arrive randomly or by accident) and those are to find out more about you or about your books.
A brief bio is the absolute minimum, along with a photo. And, yes, you must have a photo. Unless you have a really, really good reason not to include one (which doesn’t include the argument that you don’t photograph well … been there, done that), it’s essential. People have a strong urge to see what you look like when they are making a connection to you.
A Way to Contact You
Captcha - the work of the devil.
A contact form is probably the best option, because then you don’t have to expose your email address to spammers. Don’t use a ‘captcha’. It’s just an irritation to your readers. There are far better ways of dealing with contact form spam.
If you choose to use an email address instead of a contact form, consider setting up a disposable one that you can get rid of if it attracts too much spam.
If you have an agent and / or publisher, include contact details for them too. Same goes for a publicist, if you employ one.
News and Events
If you have regular events / appearances and regular news, you should include pages listing these. If you don’t, then don’t! There’s nothing worse (again!) than a news page that has the last piece of news from a year ago, or no forthcoming events at all. You might as well nail a piece of paper to your head saying ‘This author just can’t be bothered’.
As a rough guide, if you know that you will always have at least one forthcoming event scheduled or you know that you will have a real news item once a month, then go for it. Otherwise, just make this part of your blog, but assign special ‘Events’ and ‘News’ categories so that visitors can view all of those items easily.
Reviews
If you’ve only got a dozen or fewer reviews, you should probably place them strategically around the pages of your website. If you’ve got more, make a page (or page-per-book) of them. There’s a good chance that no one will actually read them, but having them lets readers know that other people liked your book enough to say so. Social proof, again.
Share Buttons
Sharing buttons are a bit of a contradiction. They are, at once, both absolutely essential and a complete disaster. If you want to people to share your content, they’re much more likely to do it if there’s an easy button to click. However, the share buttons provided by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the rest are awful. Each one of them downloads great big files that slow down your website, sometimes to a crawl, and which use up valuable data allowances for people on mobile devices.
Your best option is to have share links for the various services coded directly into your theme or template. For example, you could include share links to Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ in WordPress through this code placed in the theme files:
Now, most of you aren’t programmers, and if you aren’t having someone create a theme for you, you’ll need to either find a plugin that does this without any of the unnecessary download crud, or take the performance hit (in which case, make sure you only use the absolutely essential share buttons, because every additional one adds overhead and slows the site).
Actually, you don’t have to have a blog. A blog gives people reasons to come back to your site, rather than just visiting for specific information, but it takes a lot of effort, and it’s only worth doing if you enjoy blogging.
A Press Kit
You should include the following in your press kit:
A short biography – just a paragraph or two. Maybe 50 – 100 words
A medium biography – roughly 150 – 200 words
A long biography – roughly 500 words
A photo – at various sizes. A good guide would be small (maybe 100 – 150px wide), medium (maybe 300 – 350px), and a high-resolution photo suitable for printing (you want at least 3 inches wide at 300 px per inch, so at least 900px wide, but preferably more).
Specific info about each book
Book covers, again with at least a small and a high-resolution version
Contact information for you and your agent
Sample interview questions and answers – remember, not everyone will have time to read your book
Optionally include samples of reviews, but only if they are reviews from respected reviewers or publications
Information about any awards won, particularly if anyone will have heard of them
All of this stuff should be on your website, as web pages. But, ideally, you should also include it as a single zipped folder for downloading. Make it clear what is in the zipped folder when you do so. You may want a ‘light’ version without the high-resolution images for download as well, which may be more useful for bloggers. If you’ve no idea what zipped files and folders are, here’s a brief, simple guide from the BBC.
Appearances / School Visits Information
If you’re available for appearances or school visits (either in person or via Skype), give clear information about how you can be booked.
Next Time…
Okay, so that’s stuff that pretty much every author website needs. Next time I’ll talk about some other things that are important to bear in mind when you’re building your author website.
Feel free to leave any comments or questions below, or any suggestions for what else you think is essential for an author website.
