Content is Kitten
Loosely organized advice focused on professional authors, but I hope anyone in the book community can find helpful nuggets herein.
2,900 words • 12 min read • updated March 1, 2024
Very very specifically for novelists: why do you need a website anyway?
A lot of websites are necessary for the thing they talk about to exist. You can’t sell wickets without a store. But most authors don’t sell their books themselves. All you can do is send people off to bookstores and find out many months later if some people, potentially unrelated to the people who visited your website, bought your books at those stores.
From my view on the sidelines, I see authors having four parallel goals and your site doesn’t further a single one:
Write a good book. Your site will only help you procrastinate.
Sell a lot of copies. I can’t think of a way to reliably compare books sold with and without a website, but I doubt good sites increase traditional sales. Consider that Donna Tartt has no online presence at all — but we can’t all live off the blood of MFA candidates, can we? (Can we?)
Get prestigious recognition. Media outlets probably appreciate a good press kit, but does it make an impact on their Best Of lists every December? I hope not.
Make a difference in readers’ lives. Your site is going to make very little difference on the impact of your actual novel.
But here’s where I try to talk you back into it…
Fandom.
If you’ve ever fallen in love with a book and were hungry for more — people love your books that way, and more can live on your site. That can make a greater difference in readers’ lives.
Get people to leave you alone.
On your site, you can answer all the questions people keep asking you, and direct requests to your agent and publicity team as firmly as possible.
Autonomy.
Between your Goodreads profile and the Amazon Author Page, Jeff really wants you to think he’s eclipsed the need for a separate website. That way lies the death of democracy! Your site does a small part to prevent Amazon’s monopoly in the book industry.
Pride.
Your site can be a beautiful home to show off your work.
Books
Authors, if you only have 1–2 books, you don’t need a separate page to list your books. List them on the homepage. Make them easy as pie to find.
Do you have a story in an anthology? Include it on your books list!
Is a story available in an anthology and on its own? To decrease reader confusion about if this is the same story and if they’ve read it before, show both covers on your books list, but link them to the same page. Show two separate lists of buy links.
Don’t be afraid to re-write back cover copy. Trust your marketing team, but trust yourself and your readers, too. Fun, tropey descriptions needn’t only be found on tweets and AO3 tags. Your website may be one of your most professional homes on the internet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be as funny and irreverent and joyful as you want. You may be a company, you boss bitch, but you’re also a human and that’s kinda rare on the internet these days. Lean into it.
Offer content warnings. I wish putting these in the book would take off in traditional publishing, but this is the next best thing. I understand being worried about spoilers, but this can make readers feel a lot safer embarking on your book. If you’re not sure what to include, just start with something, acknowledge it’s incomplete, and ask readers to help you fill it in.
Before your book is available, list the release date.
On release day, remember to update every instance of “preorder” with “order” across the site. Take your preorder campaign page down. If you write something that won’t be true forever, remind yourself to update it later.
Books, cont’d: credit
List books’ publisher and ISBNs.
Credit your cover artist with a link to their web presence.
Credit your cover designer with a link. This is usually a separate job and just as important. Your cover designer is listed on your copyright page, but you may need to ask your team for this info before your book is released.
If you commission art for your book — which you always should, please, nothing gets me more hype for an upcoming release — credit the artist with a link.
These folks made readers’ first association with your book and you should be proud of them!
Books, cont’d: buy links
More than serving a practical purpose, your list of buy links is a declaration of your values.
Including Bookshop, Libro.fm, Indiebound, or your local indie’s own online store shows your commitment to independent bookstores. Linking to the StoryGraph as well as Goodreads shows your commitment to a black-owned alternative to Amazon. Including WorldCat or OverDrive welcomes library users. Including Indigo and Kobo welcomes Canadian readers. Including Blackwell’s welcomes UK readers (and free shipping of UK covers to US readers). Including Book Depository, with its free worldwide shipping, welcomes international readers. (RIP Book Depository, fuck you Jeff)
Will most of your sales still come from Amazon? Yes. Will not including an Amazon link decrease your readers’ ability to get to your book on Amazon? Will missing any link make your book harder to find at that store? I don’t think so! We are creatures of habit. Every online book buyer knows how to use the search bar on the site where they buy books.
Don’t worry about including everything. A missing link won’t lose someone who wants to buy! right! now! and seeing the right link won’t change the mind of someone who’s determined to pirate it or stick to their book buying ban. Buyers will find your books.
But listing Libro.fm might just make visitors think — oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to try them! And just like that, you helped to support an indie bookstore.
A lot of booksellers offer graphics you can use as buttons, but they may have requirements that you don’t incorporate their logos into other designs, or that they’re displayed above any other store logo on your page. Here’s Apple Books’ very extra guidelines, for example. Read the terms before you use those graphics. Text links or buttons are safer bets. Fuck cops and fuck capitalism, but you should always know what rules you’re breaking.
Books, cont’d: affiliate links
A lot of booksellers offer affiliate programs and, if you’re sharing a lot of book buy links, making them affiliate links can be a nice passive income source. However, according to both FTC guidelines and the terms of most affiliate programs themselves, you need to tell people you’re using affiliate links and it needs to be extremely obvious. Penguin Random House discloses their use of affiliate programs on this page linked in their footer and that is against FTC guidelines because it would be very easy for people to click on affiliate link without having ever seen that disclosure. (But it’s a good list of programs you can sign up for.)
The top of a Penguin Random House book page. They should have their affiliate disclosure listed visibly in this area, where people will click buy links.
Why should you care? Well, the FTC might one day make you care. I believe you should care about supporting and following government regulations because they keep us all safer. And this regulation in particular helps to acknowledge bias in online recommendations, which helps us all be more thoughtful consumers. (There’s a clear difference between you selling your own books and a Kardashian endorsing laxatives, but you disclosing your affiliate links is the equivalent of household recycling. Do what you can!)
Here’s an explanation of affiliate link disclosures that I trust and they make a great point that an explicit disclosure can make you more relatable™ and boost trust. Don’t be afraid of that.
About the author
Stick a big ole photo on there, sexy.
Consider writing a different bio than what’s in the back of your book. It’s likely a reader read that, or heard it quoted at an event, and came to this page to find out more. You could do something cute like “10 things you didn’t know about this author.”
(If you really want a small photo and your standard bio, does it need to be its own page? Consider sharing that on a section of your homepage, instead!)
This is an easy place to put past interviews and press coverage. You don’t need a separate page for that unless you want to highlight your nonfiction writing.
Put pics of your pets. Put em! I want to seeeee.
Media/Press Kit
It’s never too early to have one. When I worked on my college newspaper, I always looked for a press kit in the footer. Include the bio you want to be used when someone introduces you at an event. Include a photo and book cover files that are large enough to be crisp when printed on flyers. Include some past press highlights if you want, make your new interviewers nervous.
FAQ
A wise coworker once told me that an FAQ is admitting your site architecture has failed. I’m of two minds about it. On one hand, an FAQ allows both writer and reader to be lazy, which is nice. You can pile answers on a page and readers can use command+F to find what they’re looking for — there’s nothing wrong with that.
But it’s not the only way.
Say you have an unusual name: put the pronunciation in your FAQ and people will probably guess that’s a frequently asked question and go to your FAQ to find it — or you could put it in the first line of your About page. You could answer “Where can I buy signed copies?” in your FAQ — or you could include it in the buy links on each book page. So, on the other hand, most answers to frequently asked questions have a home on other pages, and those pages have names that tell someone what they’ll find there, and keeps them closer to the stuff you want them to find — your next book, your social media links, etc.
On an effective site, finding information is intuitive. You probably don’t need an FAQ page.
Events
If you’re booked up with release promo, I know it can feel overwhelming to get all the events up on your event page, but it’s really useful.
As a reader who’s scrolled back through many a X feed looking for a virtual event promo I thought I remembered, your Events page can serve as a reliable home for links — or at least the name of the event host where I'll probably be able to find a link. As an author, it can remind you of interesting streams you can link on your About page.
If you’re not using the Events Collection feature on Squarespace, or an events plugin like The Events Calendar on WordPress, which automatically delete events, make sure to delete listings when they’re over. Old events are disappointing and instantly make your site less trustworthy.
If you don’t have any events planned, you can take that page out of the main navigation. Bring it back when you need it. Or, temporarily replace a calendar with information to engage event organizers. Lead them to your contact page, or to a list of panels, presentations, or workshops you’re prepared to give.
Don’t highlight an empty events page. Every page in your navigation should be working hard for you.
Writing on the internet
If you’re making a site in the book community, your job — whether you get paid for it or not — is writing. You write books, or reviews, or critical essays, or commentary. Beyond that stuff you (could) get paid for, you write a lot of emails. You write responses to dozens of simultaneous conversations on X. You write answers to interview questions. You write guest posts on other blogs. Unless you’re passionate about it, don’t commit yourself to more writing.
There are only so many hours in the day. Save your energy for the writing that matters. If it’s only obligation making you slog through nonessential writing, don’t do it. Find an alternate solution.
Not all nonessential writing can be filed neatly under “passion” or “obligation,” of course, but try to find the passion in everything you agree to. If you’re writing something because a dear friend asked you to, you’re passionate about helping your friend. If it’s because a marginalized blogger asked, you’re passionate about raising important voices.
Moving onto the obligations you set up for yourself…
Blogging
You don’t need to blog.
Blogging well is a full-time job and you already have one or two of those. If you have long-from thoughts to share from time to time, Medium is perfect for that. Or I love how artist Jessica Hische offers a list of “Thoughts” on her site. This format removes any expectation of regular updates or when something was written. It’s just evergreen useful information.
Don’t highlight an unused blog.
News
You don’t need a news feed.
Internet people trust that your social networks will have the latest and greatest — and let’s be honest, no matter how good you try to be about updating your site, I’ll bet you spend so much more time on Instagram or X, it’s bound to have more information. If you’re worried your X has too much else going on that your real news gets lost… well, that’s why people like social media. Telling site visitors about your preorder campaign doesn’t need to be dated, in a chronological list of information about you. Just put it on your homepage.
If you really want a highlights reel, add text-based graphics on your Instagram, and put an Instagram feed embed on your homepage. That serves the dual purpose of telling your Instagram followers about your news, and promoting your Instagram to site visitors.
Don’t highlight a news feed that’s out of date.
Email marketing
You don’t need to send newsletters… but if you want to reach your audience, it might be a good idea.
If you send a newsletter, benchmarks say that you’re probably going to get higher engagement on them than on any other way you talk to readers. There’s no category for authors, but looking at the categories Art and Artists and Media and Publishing, the average open rate is between 22–26%. How does that compare to Instagram? The mediums are so different, it’s impossible to say. Opening an email is a clear, but relatively passive, indication of engagement. It goes beyond noticing, but it’s not quite taking an action like clicking Like, replying, or sharing. X “views” are bullshit and could indicate scrolling past too fast to process any information about the post, and Instagram posts have no equivalent metric at all. Still, divide your likes+retweets+replies by your follower count and you’ll get a kinda-comparable engagement rate. I usually see around 1% or less these days. Even if a lot more people are following you on Instagram than on your mailing list as you start to grow it, you may still actually reach more people over email.
Thanks to the obfuscation of book sales data, how any of that relates to book sales — never mind any of your other professional goals — is really hard to know. Newsletters have less instant gratification than a social post, and less opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with readers, but by the numbers, it’s well worth it to send newsletters.
You don’t need to promise newsletters at regular intervals. In fact, I recommend that you don’t. If your newsletter’s main purpose is to increase book sales, send infrequent newsletters that focus on the release.
Notes
A launch announcement is a great project to outsource to a friend. Your friends love you, and they’re proud of your book, and they aren’t exhausted of talking about it like you are, so let them write a little promotional squee fest about your upcoming release. Then you just need to review it, feel your heart fill with love as you do, and send.
Newsletters, cont’d: a treatise against regularity
If you come up with a value-add that makes your newsletter a thing onto itself — i.e. writing advice, life advice, “what I’ve been loving” — you still don’t need to promise regular delivery. You’re giving away your thoughtful content for free, that’s the least you can do for yourself. If there’s something within you that really wants it to be regular, consider going the extra mile to set it up for Ghost*, Patreon, a podcast, YouTube channel, or virtual course. If you don’t want to put up any barriers to access for ethical reasons, good for you! But then I’ll say it again: what does anyone gain by making it regular? I’ve heard so many authors say, “I wish I’d never taken this on. Blogging/newsletters/other writing on the internet is a trap.” No, it’s not! Promised regularity is a trap. You shouldn’t have to figure out what to do with your hobby/volunteer work when you go on vacation or lose your mind during a pandemic.
Anyway, newsletters are tricky one to advise on without talking to you about your specific goals and constraints, so my main advice is: sign up for a newsletter service and put a subscribe form on your site so you can start growing your list. Most services will let you do that for free. Go signup now. You don’t need to promote it, or send any newsletters ever, but there’s no harm in collecting emails.
*One more thing on monetizing your regular content
Until March 2021, I recommended Substack, but Sarah Gailey migrated their newsletter to Ghost and I’ll quote them: “If there can be no profit without investment in exposing trans people to harm, then there should be no profit.” There’s more explanation in their post and in links within that post.
It’s very simple. I do not recommend Substack. Ghost seems terrific and better than Substack in many ways, including standing with the trans community and reminding me of ghosts! As of March 18, 2021 Malinda Lo is considering not hosting her content anywhere she doesn’t control, which is very fair (and another good argument for a self-hosted WordPress site.)
Notes
Readers, if hearing that you’d get an email every month was what finally swayed you to subscribe to a newsletter, please tweet me about that. I’d love to pick your brain.
Copyright
You need one! Set a January 1 reminder to update the year.
Privacy Policy
You need one! It both protects you and complies with FTC regulations. 500px has a great privacy policy that also helps to explain what privacy policies are for.
Not to sound like a TermsFeed hashtag ad, but they’ve got a good guide for writing your policy. (TermsFeed has competitors that are probably also good, I just happen to turn to TermsFeed.)
GDPR and CalOPPA compliance: what cookies is your site setting and do you need to tell people about it?
UGH I DON’T KNOW. Here’s another TermsFeed link. These recent laws are the reason you’ve gotten so many notifications of sites updating their privacy policy, and why you have to agree to sites setting cookies before you can click anything else. They’re intended to keep companies from having too much access to users’ personal information.
My only warnings are:
GDPR and CalOPPA regulations apply to you even if you don’t live in the EU or California state. They protect residents of those areas who might access a site no matter where that site owner lives or even who that site is intended for.
Most sites you see on the internet are not properly following regulations. Don’t follow someone’s example and assume you did it right.
My only advice is that you should get your lawyer to verify you’re legally covered.
And what is absolutely not intended to be legal advice is that, if you’re not asking users to sign in, you’re probably not collecting personally identifiable information, and the GDPR and CalOPPA regulatory bodies probably aren’t worried about your little corner of the internet.
Spring cleaning
Your site isn’t finished once you launch it! Like becoming a legal adult, there is so much crap still to come, including an unconscionable amount of chores.
Once in a while — monthly, seasonally, or even once a year is better than never — you should read through every page you can get to within two clicks of your homepage and make sure everything is still right. Read all the words. Click every link. Test every form. Take a look at some pages on your phone.
Your own website is a writing project that you never turn in. You just keep editing it. A gift and a curse.