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Let’s Address a Common Misunderstanding About Author Websites

February 22, 2016 By Jane Friedman

For nearly five years now, I’ve taught classes on how to build and optimize author websites. Every single class, here’s the most common question I receive:

Is it OK if I publish my book on my website?

This question gets expressed in a multitude of ways, such as:

What if I post full chapters of my book on my website (or blog)?
If I serialize my book on my website (or blog), is it considered published?
How can I charge a subscription fee for work I publish at my website?

My first answer is a very direct one: Sure, posting content you own at your website is OK. But why do it?

What do you gain by posting your book, in part or in its entirety, on your website?
How will anyone know it’s there?
Why will anyone want to read it on your website?

What are you trying to accomplish by putting it on your site and not publishing it through the biggest retailer of ebooks (Amazon)?

This question indicates a misunderstanding of what author websites are meant to accomplish—or at least the majority of them.

An author website is primarily a marketing tool, not a publishing and distribution tool.

The No. 1 reason to build an author website is to create a marketing and publicity hub for everything you do. It tells the story of you and your work. It’s a 24/7 business card that never stops working on your behalf. It offers official information about your books, offers a way for readers to stay in touch (such as through an email newsletter or links to social media), and provides a public face to the media and others who might wish to offer media coverage.

Some authors blog on their website, and in that case, yes, there’s a publishing function involved—but the blog is, at its heart, a marketing tool, part of your author platform and long-term business strategy.

There will always be success stories and inspiring case studies of authors who blogged their way to book deals, or who serialized their work on their own site, and somehow amassed a huge following. One such example is The Martian. But these are such outlying cases that they have no bearing on the fact that author websites aren’t ideal as a publishing and distribution platform for book-length work. They’re best at building your author brand and direct marketing to readers.

A much more effective way to build a readership is to publish and distribute your work where the readers are looking for their next best read—whether that’s Amazon, Wattpad, or some other platform for reading and writing where thousands of people gather. It’s quite difficult for fiction writers to turn their own site into a destination site—not impossible, but not within the existing skill set of most authors. [Read more…]

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Writing is Hard

December 15, 2015 By Dave King

It doesn’t seem that hard at first. When you’re caught up in the thrill of creating people and telling their story, writing feels like the easiest thing in the world. You just go on doing it until you get to the end. Then you put that first work in a drawer for a month and […]

In Praise of Paper Books

April 15, 2014 By Dave King

I recently started rereading a book I bought many years ago – one volume of an eight volume collected set of The Spectator, a London daily periodical from the early 18th century. William Addison and Joseph Steele wrote most of the The Spectator’s 2500-word, witty and wise essays on serious topics of social value. A […]

Beyond Dickens: Trends and Tech in Serial Fiction

February 24, 2014 By Jane Friedman

Note from Jane: This piece first appeared in the January 2014 issue of Scratch, a digital magazine about writing and money. I am delighted to run it here at Writer Unboxed, where it can be publicly discussed and shared. Two commenters on this post were randomly selected to receive a free annual subscription to Scratch, […]

‘Wins’ Without Losses: Agreeable Disagreement

May 25, 2013 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Five Quite Recent Provocations Langdon gasped. If he’d deciphered the symbols correctly, Jesus had married Joan of Arc at Stonehenge! If not, it was a recipe for meatloaf. — Dan Vinci’s Nunferno (@Nunferno) May 24, 2013 Provocation One: Man Booker Irrational? When the American novelist Lydia Davis was given the £60,000 Man Booker International this […]

Conferences: Songs from the Uproar

April 27, 2013 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

Do you go to conferences? Boy, I do. One of the greatest aspects of conference-going is meeting people you might have known only on the ether, putting a face to the avatar. Here, for example, is author Chuck Wendig, whom I’ve met several times at conferences. Both of us normally have some traveling to do, to […]

Something Old, Something New

May 16, 2012 By Sophie Masson

Like most writers, whether new or established, I have folders—physical and electronic—filled with stories that either never quite got to publication but that your instinct tells you are still worth something; or else were published long ago and whose details might be a bit dated, yet whose core is still strong. These aren’t dead stories, […]

Advice for Indie Authors

February 23, 2012 By Anna Elliott

As promised last month, I’m back this month with some strategies and advice for anyone considering the indie publishing route. And a quick update before I begin–I’ve actually had a great month, sales wise. (Thank you to any WU readers who bought copies of my books!) Two of my titles, Susanna and the Spy and […]

‘Social’ Media: What isn’t in a name

February 4, 2012 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson)

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour… Sonnet 126 The so-called “social” media, currently our lovely boy of communication, hold in their darting packets of data, surely, unimaginable power. They collapse distance across continents and seas we once showed on […]