Authors, when you have your own website, there are such tremendous advantages. Yes, there is a cost but there is a cost to everything. Here are some things you need to keep in mind as advantages for having your own website:
* wonderful opportunity to market yourself
* all the info is about you and you have the space to be detailed and precise about the info
* you have a great (and safe) platform to communicate with your audience
* you can showcase smaller clips of your work
* you can have your own blog posts and people can subscribe (those are the people you KNOW want to hear from you)
* you can include videos and drive traffic to your own site
* you control exactly what is included on your site (you control the content)
Fact is, when a person has a site, it is a place people go to when they are interested in you. I don’t know about you, but when I look at something really cool or I read something really cool, I search for more info on that person and I am interested in knowing how they got to where they are. I get a bit excited when I see that they have their own site.
Also, it is a really good idea to invest a bit of money into getting a professional-looking website. This is really important because if your site doesn’t look professional, it doesn’t reflect well on you. At all. A “cheap looking” site that doesn’t include your own name as the domain gives the impression that you are a “here today, gone tomorrow” kind of person. You need to put quality out there. If you don’t have the site skills, hire someone for a little bit of money to get this done.
Partnership
When you work with a publisher, know that you are entering a business partnership with that publisher. This means that they have some responsibilities and so do you. I will do a more extensive post on the particulars of that partnership but one of your main responsibilities is that there is an expectation that you will be working diligently on marketing and promoting your book. One of the best ways and avenues to do that is by using your website and linking social media posts to your website. Many authors think that the most important thing is to get media coverage. Media coverage is great but ultimately, you want to have your own website so that when people want to connect with you outside of the media coverage and to buy more from you, they have an outlet.
So….how is your site coming along? 🙂