Author website must-haves

By Pauline Wiles

As a writer, you might presume that creating your website should be easy.

In fact, finding the perfect words for your online home can often be challenging. Moreover, design decisions and technology choices can be downright overwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be hard, though, especially if you start slowly. It’s all about knowing what you can and can’t live without in an author website.

7 key elements

Here are seven author website essentials. 

1. Clean design

Modern websites are lean and clutter-free. I can generally spot an older site solely from extraneous information clamoring for my attention. Keep your words concise. Limit decorative elements, choosing “white space” instead.

If you’re sprucing up your current site, your sidebar and footer are prime areas for purging clutter.

With website traffic coming increasingly through mobile devices, clean design is vital. And don’t forget to make sure your site looks great on a phone.

2. Book information

As a rule of thumb, the more books you’ve published, the less information your website needs for each title.

For your debut release, you’ll be proud and excited. With only one book to showcase, you might feature:

• A description
• Reviews
• Several “buy” links
• ISBN number
• Book club questions

However, if you have, say, eight books in the same genre, prune this to each book’s:

• Title
• Cover
• Single purchase link
• One-sentence teaser

Recommend a reading order for your books if appropriate, but don’t overload fans with details.

3. Clear calls to action

Don’t give your audience a dozen options. A highly effective website prioritizes the ideal single next step that you’d like your visitor to take. That’s your “call to action.”

In addition, research shows that visitors are more likely to see and click on buttons, versus underlined text links. So, pick a clear “call to action” for each page, and create a button in an eye-catching color.

Calls to action include buying your book or subscribing to email updates.

4. High-quality author photo

Unless you’re desperate to retain privacy, you’ll form a closer reader relationship if you show your face on your website.

Just as you wouldn’t attend a party without sprucing up, your author photo should reveal you at your best. Use one that’s recent and good quality. Don’t use a hasty selfie, or a poorly cropped picture.

A professional author photo truly is a worthwhile expense.

5. Recent content

If you care about your readers, demonstrate it by keeping the content on your website fresh. This doesn’t mean you must publish weekly articles (see below), but check that your copyright year is current and “news” is still applicable.

Remove dead social media links.

If I see a Google+ link on a website, I know it probably shelters other cobwebs, too.

6. Mailing list invitation

If you don’t yet have an author website, I encourage you to publish a few simple pages initially, without getting bogged down in extras. Setting up a mailing list should follow as soon as you’re able.

If you’re daunted by the idea of a newsletter, it’s fine to gather email addresses before you plan to send regular updates. At a minimum, you’ll have permission to notify readers of your next release.

Once you have a mechanism for collecting emails, you must also publish a privacy policy that states how you’ll handle that information.

You’ll need to offer something to encourage site visitors to provide their email address. This “lead magnet” can be a free sample of your work or another reader resource.

But don’t let a lack of this type of gift prevent you from setting up your list. If necessary, it can come later.

7. Contact information

Many authors favor a contact form, but a simple email address on your website is adequate.

Journalists typically prefer this more direct method, and if you hope to be interviewed on current topics, you should consider including your phone number, too.

If you do opt for a form, check it regularly to make sure it still works.

A few author website non-essentials

You have limited time and energy for your marketing efforts. Especially at first, you can get away without these:

• Press/media kit: Unless you’re pitching to mainstream outlets, emailing relevant information will suffice.
• Long bio: Today’s website visitors typically scan your content, so a few engaging sentences are better than reams of text.
• Blog: Especially if your site is new, or if you’re not seeing results from blogging, focus instead on submitting guest articles to other sites with complementary audiences.

Aim for simplicity

The most effective author websites are constructed deliberately and thoughtfully.

Rather than treat your website as a repository of all your writerly interests, aim instead for strictly curated pages.

Whether you already have an author website or are starting from scratch, the best philosophy is less is more. By keeping it simple, your website is easier to construct, and to maintain. And, you’ll minimize typos and broken links while increasing the likelihood that your visitor will take action.

Not only will you make it easier on yourself, but clear, concise content is the ultimate compliment to your reader.

What’s your biggest frustration with your author website? Please tell us in a comment.

If you’re looking for book publicity — free media exposure — you have to:

• Have an author press kit on your website
• Include the right elements with the right information
• Present it in a format that’s easy for all journalists to use

Are you making any of these common author press kit mistakes that are interfering with your ability to effectively promote your book? Don’t worry if you are — all of these can be fixed easily:

1. You don’t have an online press room with an author press kit.

Get out! No press room? No press kit? No media information? You need to read “Must-have online press room elements for authors and books” before you go any further.

Actually, most authors don’t have one, which means those who do are light years ahead of their competition when it comes to priceless book publicity.

When I’m looking for an expert author to interview for a magazine article assignment and have two choices, which one do you think I’ll contact — the one with a press kit or the one without? When I see an online press kit, I think, “This person wants to be interviewed. I won’t have to talk him into it.”

Unless you’re trying to hide from the press, you need one. It’s expected; it’s useful.

2. Your press materials are only in PDF format.

Here’s the problem with PDFs: You want journalists to copy and paste your press releases, fact sheets, bios, etc. In many cases, when someone copies text from a PDF and drops it into Word or another program, all formatting is lost. The journalist has to manually insert paragraph returns and so on.

That’s a problem.

So you want your press materials available in a format that lets people copy and paste easily. That’s plain text in the same way that the text on your “about” page is plain text.

Ditch the PDFs, even though you see publishers and publicists using them. They create problems.

Candy Harrington’s press rooms for each of her books are great examples of how to do it the right way. You’ll see how easy it is to copy and paste the text.

3. There’s no date on your press releases.

When your book announcement press release doesn’t have a date, I don’t know if the book is new or three years old.

Perhaps you’ve got a press release listing your bookstore appearances, but you haven’t included the year. A journalist compiling a local calendar of events won’t be able to use the information without taking extra steps to confirm that it’s current. As soon as you force reporters to take unnecessary steps, you lose them.

4. You don’t provide contact information.

This is incredibly common, probably because it doesn’t occur to you that someone might want to contact you for an interview or to ask a few questions.

Picture this*: A local network TV affiliate is searching online for local romance authors for a new twist on the usual Valentine’s Day segment.

The reporter finds your site, is thrilled to see that you have a press room, but can’t find your contact information on that section of your site, in your press releases, or on your site at all, for that matter (another common problem).

That will probably cost you that publicity opportunity.

5. There are no images.

Not that you need a lot of them, but you do need your book cover and an author head shot.

Make them available in both high-resolution (“high res” is 300 dpi or greater) and low-resolution (“low res” is less than 300 dpi) versions. Publications need high-res images; bloggers and websites like low-res.

6. You haven’t clearly identified the press room where you house your author press kit.

Label it clearly on your toolbar.

Title options include:

• Press Room
• Press Kit
• For the Media
• For the Press
• Newsroom

Many authors, experts, and others have a section identified as “Media,” which tricks journalists into thinking that they’ll find press kit elements there. What they find instead are reprints or links to articles or segments that include an interview with the author. That’s good — reporters like knowing that their interview won’t be your first — but it’s misleading.

If you have a “media” page that showcases your publicity success but doesn’t have press materials, add them so you’re both serving and attracting journalists.

Make sure you create an online press kit and house it in on your website so that you not only support your publicity efforts, but so that you improve your site’s search engine optimization — SEO — too.

Avoid mistakes by using templates

Need help creating your online press kit? “Build Book Buzz Publicity Forms & Templates” has a template and sample for every author press kit element, from your book announcement press release to your bio and sample question and answer sheet.

Learn more at http://buildbookbuzz.com/publicity-forms-and-templates/.

What do you call your online press room? Tell us in a comment.

_{*Channeling my inner Sophia Petrillo}

My hand is up.

I’ve seen photos where the author is just staring into a webcam. No smile. No warmth. Just a stare.

Then there are the smartphone selfies. (What adult has actually mastered the art of the selfie?)

Sometimes you can tell that another person standing next to the author has been cropped out.

Other times, the author is joined in the photo by someone else — usually a spouse — who isn’t cropped out.

If your author photo is bad, is your book bad, too?

These amateur photos are certainly more affordable than professional head shots, but they aren’t very useful. The author might as well be saying to readers, “Quality isn’t important to me.”

Put more simply: When readers see that you don’t care enough to use a quality head shot, they might think that you don’t care enough to write a quality book, either. Who’s going to take a chance on a book that might be sub-par at best?

I’ve said it before: Quality counts. You need to write a good book, and you need to present yourself to readers as a writer who cares about getting things “right.”

The goal is to always create a book and corresponding marketing materials that are as good as your book. Your headshot is one key element of all of those materials, whether we’re talking about your Amazon Author Central profile, your website, or the profile photo you use for social media accounts. They all feature your head shot — it’s the common denominator.

So it had better be good.

Yes, you have to spend money to get a good quality professional author photo. Many authors are reluctant to do that, while others simply don’t have the money for it. Money can be an obstacle, but there’s usually a way around that.

Four ways to save money on your author photo

Here are four ways to get a headshot that’s better than the do-it-yourself option, but less expensive than paying full price at a studio.

1. Barter.

Bartering involves swapping services. What do you do well that can help a professional photographer? Another way to approach this is to ask the photographer what she needs help with and then figure out how you can contribute in a way that makes a service swap fair.

You might write a newsletter, shop for props, or serve as a baby wrangler on a shoot.

2. Offer to model for a photography class or workshop.

This gives aspiring photographers practice and helps expand their portfolios. You get an author photo that’s better than you’d take on your own.

3. Hire a photography student at a discounted rate.

Students don’t expect to be paid top dollar, but you still want to pay for their time. It’s an incentive for them to do their best.

What if you don’t like the beginner’s photos? Discuss that in advance. You might be able to negotiate to only pay if you’re happy.

4. Get it done at a writer’s conference.

I had my past two headshots taken at the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) annual conference in New York City. The photographer offered discounted sessions because he didn’t have to market his services and because he’d have a steady stream of customers.

Many other conferences contract with a photographer to take on-site headshots at a discount, too. If you plan on attending a writer’s conference, be sure to check the schedule to see if this is offered as an add-on.

What do people look for in head shots?

Photofeeler lets you get feedback on your photos. In addition, the company surveyed its users to get feedback on elements that produce a better professional profile photo. You can read the results in the company’s article, “New Research Study Breaks Down the Perfect Profile Photo.”

It offers helpful tips that range from “let your teeth show when you smile” (whoops — see mine with no teeth in the site header above!) to “wear your eyeglasses” (score one for me!).

Do-it-yourself tips

You can also take the D-I-Y approach, but you’ll have to step up your game. Hubspot, one of my favorite marketing information resources, offers advice in the article, “How to Take Your Own Professional Headshot: A Budget Friendly Guide.”

Finally, study author photos before updating yours. What do you like about some of them? What do you dislike? If you’re going to work with a photographer — even a student photographer — it helps to show them what does and doesn’t work for you.

I’ve saved a few that I like on a Pinterest board. If you’re thinking about getting a new author photo, creating a similar Pinterest board might make it easy for you to save (and later find) examples you like.

Finally, remember to use the same headshot for all social media profiles and everywhere you are online, including your website and its media/press room (learn more about that in “Must-have online press room elements for authors and books“).

By the way, if you don’t have a website yet, get one up and running now. You’ll need to contract with a hosting company; I use Hostgator. It’s offering 75 percent off hosting plus “select” domains (website addresses) for $2.99 through tomorrow, March 16 at 11:59 pm CT, with my affiliate link for new accounts.

Finally, remember that your author photo says a lot about you. You want it to say the right things.

Have you seen a great author photo? Please share a link to it in a comment.