Some of you are saying, “I don’t even have a book done yet.” Exactly. If you’re serious about publishing books, you need to get your name out now. Marketing is the only way you will get your books to sell. No time is too soon to get a website. You can use a social media platform if you want, but you must have a website. It’s a place for your fans to find you, your books, and your story.
I’m not tech illiterate, but I’m also not a technology genius. I thought building a website would be easy, but it wasn’t. Looking to people more knowledgable on websites than me, I was able to muddle through the process. The goal of this post is to help you get through the process a little easier than I did. Since I am not an expert, there will be a lot of external links to other internet posts from people more qualified than me. I’ll walk you through my process, and let you decide if you want to follow my path or discover your own.
Choosing A Website Host And Platform:
After reading many web articles about recommendations for websites, I took the advice of Joe Bunting. He wrote a post specifically on author websites, and I found his knowledge and arguments sound. I haven’t regretted following his advice, and I recommend it to you. I followed his suggestion of doing a WordPress website through Bluehost. The rest of this post will be about building a website through these two companies.
Signing Up With A Host:
Once I picked this route, I signed up with Bluehost. It cost less than $75 to sign up for the first year. The price will go up as time passes, but it’s not a bad amount for the marketing. Plus, it includes your domain name for free the first year.
Creating The Website:
You will have to pick a theme for your website layout. Some are free and some cost. If you aren’t making money yet, free is the way to go. It doesn’t look any less professional than the paid ones. There are millions of themes to chose from so don’t get bogged down with making a decision. Just pick one (you can always change it later). It should be easy to find an online instructional video on how to set up the theme you picked. I found one for my theme, Hestia, on YouTube. Setting up a website was time consuming, but pretty straight forward (minus one exception below).
Insider Tip: Making A Contact Form
Building a website was simple, but I chose to make a contact form. My original plan was to have a contact page with my email address so people could talk with me. Someone smarter than me warned me against it. There are programs set up to crawl the internet and look for email addresses to spam, and using a contact form saves you that trouble.
Setting up the form is easy. I just installed the WP Forms plugin on WordPress and made a simple contact form. I tested it to make sure it worked, as should you on your own website, and it didn’t. It took six weeks of trouble shooting and reading numerous articles to figure out why submissions were not being sent to my email. Here is what I learned.
(If I lose you, I get it. It’s greek to me too. However, it will make sense once you have the problem yourself. If it all works for you off the bat, congrats. If not, I hope this helps.)
1. Install
You will need to install WP Mail SMTP. The contact form sends an email that may not have the right authentication for your email provider to accept. Hence, they mark it as spam and block it. This plugin will help you code the automatic email so it’s accepted by your email provider.
2. Set Up
I set up a Seninblue account to route my contact form through to my email. You can use other email options, and it might work for you. This is what ended up working for me after attempting various other options. You just create an account and then edit some DNS code on Bluehost. Don’t worry, they walk you through how to edit the code so you don’t crash your website.
3. Merge
Once I had a Sendinblue account and added the DNS code to Bluehost, I had to do one more step to merge some SPF code. After following these directions, my contact form finally worked. I hope it does for you too.
Final Thoughts
That’s all the advise I can give on creating an author website. Next week, I’ll go more into content of the website, but this should be enough to keep you busy for now—especially if you come across problems I somehow missed on my journey.
Thanks for reading!
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