Preparing to Build Your Website

To achieve building a truly useful website, preparation is key. If you've subscribed to The Bookshelf, then you've already made a fantastic first step. But if you're not sure where to go from here, below are 5 important steps to think about before you visit our Builder tool and start designing your new website.

Determine Your Central Goal

A website can do a lot of things and have a lot of fancy features. But just because it can doesn't mean it should. As yourself what the #1 goal of your author website is, and plan your build around that. Common goals may include:

• Growing an email newsletter list
• Promoting a bestselling series
• Featuring an upcoming books
• Helping readers find the right book for them
• Selling books direct
• Growing social media followers

You can support multiple goals, but choosing one primary objective makes every design easier. Once you've decided on a goal, you can then peruse the available website templates in The Bookshelf and find one that supports that goal the best, and start building from there.

Understand Your Genre

Your website's design functions as the introduction to your author brand—similar to how your book covers are the introduction for your books themselves. It's important that they both represent the material within appropriately.

Just like your book cover signals genre, your website should instantly communicate:

• What you write
• Who it's for
• What tone readers can expect

Plan your design according to your genre expectations and overall branding. For example, if you write contemporary romance, you may use warm tones, soft imagery, and inviting fonts. If you write thriller, dark palettes, bold typography, and high contrast works well. If you write fantasy, atmospheric backgrounds, textured elements, and rich colors tend to be the norm.

If you write in multiple genres, consider instead using a neutral but still strong core design. Make sure you have clear separation between genre sections, and maintain visual consistency in your layouts even if the tone between them varies.

The Bookshelf's website Builder tool comes with pre-made templates already created that you can select to work with instead of building your full site from scratch. Each template is professionally designed based on genre or central purpose, so you'll already have some great guiding options. Or, take inspiration from your book covers themselves if they are on-genre.

Choose the Right Domain Name

Your domain is the URL or web address that your entire site is tied to. You may have purchased and registered one prior to signing up for The Bookshelf, in which case you can link it to your new site when you're ready to launch it. But if you haven't selected a domain for your new site already, it's important to think about what will work best for you.

A strong domain should be:

• Easy to spell
• Easy to remember
• Short and clean
• Instantly recognizable

Many authors will choose their name or pen name as their domain, sometimes followed by "author" or "writes," especially if the domain name has already been taken. It's important to do research ahead of time so this step doesn't prevent you from publishing when ready.

The Bookshelf offers most domains free for one year when you sign up (if you don't already own one you'd like to use). And for all Bookshelf authors (new domain or not), we also offer one free author email to go along with your domain. That way you can send and receive emails under your domain name for an added professional touch (e.g. jane@janesmithauthor.com). Learn more about author email here.

Prepare Website Content Before You Build

The Bookshelf's website templates have a lot of placeholder text and images included in them so you can see how everything looks. But you'll need to update the headings, body text, and many images to accurately represent you and your books, so it's important to make sure you have these materials ready before you start building your site.

Nothing has to be perfect on the first go-around; you'll have plenty of opportunity to edit and refine every section of your website before you launch it. But for the most streamlined process, it's a great idea to come to have rough drafts on hand. You want to consider copy for:

• Author bio (short and long versions)
• Book or series descriptions
• Taglines or section headings
• FAQs
• Links to social media or any other external sites

You will also want to gather any necessary images you plan to add to your site, like:

• Author photos
• Book covers
• 3D mockups of eBooks and print books
• Promo images
• Background images for site pages or sections

Gather everything into a single folder on your computer that you can easily pull from, and you'll make the site-building process that much quicker and easier.

Set Up an Email Newsletter

No matter what stage of your publishing journey you're in, it's an excellent idea to provide a way for people to hear from you. An email newsletter that people can sign up to join is an invaluable tool in helping to:

• Build direct relationships with readers
• Announce book launches
• Promote special offers or events
• Share exclusive content
• Create long-term superfans

There are many options out there for email newsletter services, and selecting the right one comes down to your goals, budget, and very often, ease of use. The Bookshelf currently offers a direct integration with MailerLite, with many more integrations for other popular providers on the way. You can connect your email account to your Bookshelf account, and that way any sign-up forms you add to your website will automatically funnel into your email system.

Offering a reader magnet in exchange for someone signing up for your newsletter can provide more incentive to sign up, so consider penning a short story, offering sample chapters, or creating workbook pages that you can automate to be delivered when someone joins your newsletter list.

Like writing your next great book, preparation can be the key to success. Take ample time to think about what you want your website to achieve for you, how you can design and build it to help with that goal, and what tactics you can use to make everything as inviting and intriguing to readers as possible. The Bookshelf has great templates and resources you can also use to help guide your decisions.