BookBub is best known in the author community as a promotional service that helps boost book sales, but we’re always exploring ways we can do more for authors.
Today, we’re excited to share an early look at a new service we’re working on — an easy-to-use website builder designed exclusively for authors called Author Websites by BookBub.
Most website builders aren’t designed with authors in mind. They’re built for everybody, from farmers to software companies to business consultants and more. In order to create a site that accomplishes their goals using one of these general-use services, authors need to invest time and money to adapt generic templates and tools, not to mention wrestle with these platforms to make changes each time they publish new books.
Our goal with Author Websites is to develop a website builder specifically for authors, one that addresses author needs and guides authors toward marketing best-practices.
What does that look like in practice? Here are some examples of capabilities we’ve been developing in Author Websites that we think will help make it easy for authors to build and maintain their websites:
- Templates designed for authors: Customizable themes created for all kinds of authors, with options for different genres, marketing priorities, career stages, and more.
- Automatic book and retailer link importing: A mechanism to quickly import book data (including covers, descriptions, and retailer links across multiple regions) so that book information can be effortlessly displayed and professionally formatted on the site.
- Dynamic book displays: Tools that make it simple for authors to shift the presentation of books on their websites so they can easily change how each work is highlighted as it evolves from a cover reveal to a preorder to a new release to the backlist.
- Series support: Built-in series management capabilities allowing authors to easily display which books are connected and in what order they should be read.
- Essential author pages: A library of page templates that authors often want for their sites, including events calendars, press kits, blog posts, videos or other media, selected reviews, and more.
- Reader email collection: Integrations with email services most popular with authors (such as Mailchimp, MailerLite, Kit, and Flodesk), so addresses collected on the site can be automatically added to existing mailing lists.
- And much more to come!
Although Author Websites is still in its early stages of development, last year we started inviting some of our author community to use it and provide feedback to help us build the service. Even in its nascent form, we’ve been getting some great feedback, and many of these authors have begun using the service to power their primary website. Here are some examples:
To help us grow the service further, we want to start getting feedback from a broader group of authors. That’s why, today, we’re opening Author Websites to anyone interested in using it.
If you’re an author who wants to create a website — or you’re thinking about changing up your existing website — feel free to give Author Websites a try.
And if you do, please share your feedback with us! We’re adding new features and improving the platform every day, and we’d love to know how you think we can make it better.
