Publisher’s Life 3: Your Website

If you’re serious about getting into business, you’ll need a professional static website to be your online business card. This should be a reader’s go-to source for information about your books and authors, and anything else you can think of that would interest your audience.

The front page is very, very important – especially in terms of what appears “above the fold”, or the first screen a viewer will see without scrolling down. This area is your first impression and should showcase what you are and what you do. In my case, it’s the business name at the top (as on all pages) followed by some fancy script programming to make my book covers float across the screen – which became necessary as soon as I had published several titles and they would no longer fit in a static arrangement. Below that I have one of our intro videos, a very brief description of us, and a link to more information about me as the boss. I feel that all these things together give a good impression of our overall angle when someone first arrives on our site.

There are many other pages too. One for each author, with a biography carefully honed by the team; one for each book; a Bookshop with links to buy our titles; a contact page, a submissions page, and pages for each of our genres, collections and projects. That may sound like a lot, but it all built up over time, project by project and author by author.

One page is probably enough to begin with, if you make sure it looks clean, professional and inviting.