Five Steps to Building Your Author Website

Over the last four weeks we’ve looked at why you need an author website and an email list, which form the basis of your platform. We've also undertaken some of the preparation in terms of deciding on genre, colours and fonts, and drafting some content. Now it’s time to pull it all together and start working on a website.

1. Get your photo redone

You know what genre you write, what “feel” your website should have, what colours you’re going to use. Now get an author photo that reflects that. No sunglasses (unless your novel is set on the French Riviera in the 1960’s and you’re going for the Jackie O look), and no selfies (unless you’re thirteen). A professional photographer is recommended, although I found a teenager with an iPhone can do a competent job.

2. Sign up for Canva’s Design School

The Canva Design School is a free 30-day challenge that will teach you the basics of design using the free Canva design tool, which will enable you to design your own blog graphics and memes. I’m a convert—mostly because of the design school.

But Canva isn’t the only free graphics program available. Others include BeFunky, PicMonkey and Pixlr.

3. Organise your social media profiles

Use Canva to design your perfect profile photo, cover photo and/or header for each of your social media outlets (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest). You may also want to develop a website logo (try 500 x 100 pixels). Then upload.

The beauty of using Canva you don’t need to know the perfect size: Canva has them as preset options. As a bonus, your Twitter header can also be used on your website.

Also remember other profiles, such as Amazon, Goodreads (and any other reader communities you’re a member of), and photos on websites you contribute to, such as group blogs. Get them all looking up-to-date, and consistent.

4. Develop your opt-in gift

This isn’t compulsory, but it’s current recommended best practice: to offer something to entice potential readers to sign up for your email newsletter (as discussed last week). You can design your opt-in gift in Canva, then save as a pdf file.

This could be:

• The first novel in a series
• The second novel in a series (e.g. if the first is already available as permafree)
• An exclusive novel or novella
• Some content related to your book (e.g. recipes)
• Your 20 favourite Bible verses
• Your 20 favourite inspirational quotes
• A monthly giveaway of a novel in your genre
• A free video training course

Note that you can’t give away any book currently enrolled in KDP Select.

What's my opt-in gift? I've got two

• At www.iolagoulton.com, I've got a list of my 50 favourite Christian novelists
• At www.christianediting.co.nz, I've got a guide to 90 publishers who publish Christian fiction and/or fiction from Christian authors.

Feel free to check out one or both of my lists!

5. Sign up for Shannon's free WP-BFF 5-Day Website Challenge

This free video series takes you through loading and customising your own WordPress website click by click using the free Make theme. Her recommended approach does use two paid products:

• The paid version of MailChimp to deliver the free opt-in gift, although you can continue to use the free version of MailChimp if you're not offering an opt-in gift. If you want to sign up for the paid version of MailChimp, use this affiliate link and we'll both get some Monkey Rewards. Or sign up via Shannon's website, so she gets the MonkeyRewards.
• The Bloom plugin from Elegant Themes, for designing an opt-in form (also an affiliate link, or use Shannon's link if you prefer). If you don't want to go the paid route yet, SumoMe is a free alternative (although you'll have to work out how to use that one yourself!)

Yes, completing this challenge is going to take you longer than five days (it took me two weeks working about an hour a day on www.iolagoulton.com, but I got through www.christianediting.co.nz more quickly because I had an idea of what I needed to do).

The challenge does assume a level of knowledge of Canva, so you might find it easy to complete the Canva 30-Day Design School first. However, completing this challenge will be quicker if you’ve taken the action steps outlined in over the last few weeks (as I found one of the most time-consuming elements was coming up with my colour branding and fonts). And at the end, you’ll have a ready-to-go website!

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction, and you can find out more about my services at my website (www.christianediting.co.nz), or follow me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christianediting), Twitter (@IolaGoulton) or Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/iolasreads).

Note on affiliate links: Using an affiliate link doesn't affect how much you pay, but it does mean if you use the affiliate link, I will receive some commission (or Shannon will, if you use her links). I'm only using links to products I use myself and recommend.

Do I have to have an Author Website?

by Iola Goulton

Last month, Jeanette O’Hagen introduced our 2016 joint posts between Australasian Christian Writers and Christian Writers Downunder with a post on platform, that elusive necessity for modern authors.

As Christians, we have an advantage in that we know our platform needs to be built on the Rock, not the shifting sands of popularity and changing trends.

As Jeanette said, while God has a plan for each of us and our writing, we need to use our God-given talents in obedience to God’s plan and the gifts He has given us.

I like this quote from Robert Louis Stevenson, because it reminds me that while responsible for planting the seeds (and perhaps keeping them fed and watered), God is responsible for the harvest.

In terms of marketing ourselves as Christian writers, we're not the responsible for the overall harvest (blog hits, comments, sales). Our job is to do the best we can in planting the seeds: writing the blog post or the magazine article or the book, and making sure it's out there where our target reader can find it (even God can't make your book an Amazon bestseller if it's still sitting on your hard drive).

One essential of online book marketing that every “expert” agrees on is this:

You must have a website.

Your website is one of the seeds. It's your online home. It’s where readers will go to find out about you and your books. I asked in a reader group and they confirmed this: they most commonly visit author websites to find out:

• More about the author
• When the author's next book releases
• What other books the author has published 
• The correct order of a series

And a website is where agents, publishers and editors will look to see if you have that magical platform. And it’s where publicists and bloggers will look to find information about you.

You also need a way for readers to subscribe to your email list—your list provider will probably have a way to integrate this with your website. I'll talk more about email lists and why they're important in a later post in this series.

Your website one of the foundational elements of your platform and of your passive marketing. While it's a lot of work to build a website, the ongoing maintenance isn't as difficult, as long as you set it up properly (and remember to keep all your themes and plugins updated, especially security plugins. I've learned that the hard way).

What does my website have to have?

Actually, not a lot. As long as it's well-designed and consistent with your brand and genre (which I've discussed on Australasian Christian writers here, here, and here). You need the following pages:

• Home (to bring people into the site and introduce your brand)
• About (to introduce you as the author, in order to begin to develop a relationship)
• Books (only once you actually have one, of course!)
• Contact (to allow people to communicate with you)

Other pages—blog, media kit, reviews, writing advice—are all optional. Which makes it a lot easier to set up a professional author website, and a lot harder to find excuses as to why you can't!

The one other essential for an author website is a way of capturing the email addresses. I'll be discussing this in a future post.

You'll notice I haven't said you have to have a blog. That's next week's topic!

Meanwhile, what questions do you have about author websites? What author websites have you visited you particularly liked? What did you like?

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction, and you can find out more about my services at my website (www.christianediting.co.nz), or follow me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christianediting), Twitter (@IolaGoulton) or Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/iolasreads).

Three Decisions to Make Before Building Your Author Website

By Iola Goulton

Last week we looked at determining your genre.If you've got that nailed down, you're ready to think about what colours and fonts are consistent with your genre and author brand. 

1. Decide your colour scheme.

The problem with picking a colour is you’re not at school any more. You have more than the standard twelve colours of crayon on offer at school (although you might have been one of the lucky kids to have Crayola crayons with 64 colours).

No, now you have an almost unlimited choice (well, somewhere around 16,700,000 if I’ve calculated correctly).

Colour should reflect your genre: black and red probably aren’t the best choices for a contemporary romance author. (Which is why we looked at genre first!)

How do you choose? What colours go together?

Don’t worry. Canva.com has some blog posts which will give you some good ideas around possible colour combinations:

• 100 Brilliant Color Combinations 
• 50 Website Color Schemes
• Build Your Brand

2. Pick your fonts.

Fonts are both easier and more difficult to pick than colours. Sure, there are less than 16,700,000 choices, but you have to choose two, or maybe even three.

You need an easy-to-read font for your body text, and another font for your headings (perhaps more than one, as you can have several levels of headings and subheadings). You can be a little more creative with this choice, but it still needs to be consistent with your genre and author brand.

Canva and Elegant Themes have some excellent blog posts on font choices:

• Stylish Fonts
• Test Rules
• Premium Script Fonts

As you look through the font lists, you’ll see a lot you don’t like, some you like but which aren’t right for your brand, and (hopefully) a smaller number of appropriate font choices. Then you need to thing about which two or three fonts you can use together. Here are three useful resources on font pairings:

• Font Pair by Mills Digital
• Canva Brand Fonts
• Canva Font Pairings 

It can be tempting to stick with the tried-and-true Arial or Times New Roman fonts, perhaps because it’s hard to decide on a font (guilty! Australasian Christian Writers uses Arial). But some of these fonts are best avoided.

3. Decide on your platform

Website design has come a long way from the days when people had to speak html as a second language in order to be able to develop a website. Now there are a variety of free and paid options that mean even the least tech-savvy person can set up a website.

The main options are Blogger (which this site is based on) and WordPress. Two less common options are Weebly and Wix. All have free and paid options, with the paid options allowing you to use a custom domain name (i.e. www.iolagoulton.com rather than www.christianreads.blogspot.com).

Blogger (powered by Google) is probably the easiest to use, especially if you’re not especially tech-savvy. You can plug and play with one of the standard Blogger templates, or add some customisation if you’re feeling adventurous and tech-savvy.

Wordpress.org (the paid version) has a huge range of themes and plugins you can use to customise your site, but most people would need the assistance of a web designer to undertake any customisation. The advantage of using a Wordpress-based site is that it’s designed to be a website not just a blog, so the finished product looks a lot more professional.

I haven’t used Weebly or Wix, so can’t comment on how easy they are to use (can you?).

Conclusion

So those are the three decisions you need to make before beginning work on your author website. I’ll be back next week with the three pages you need on your author website, and two optional pages (they’re not what you think!).

Meanwhile, what questions do you have that you’d like me to address in these posts?

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction, and you can find out more about my services at my website (www.christianediting.co.nz), or follow me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christianediting), Twitter (@IolaGoulton) or Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/iolasreads).