What an author website is actually for
Most author websites are built as though they were a business card: here is my photograph, here are my books, here are some links to buy them. Pleasant, harmless, and almost entirely inert.
An author site has one strategic purpose that outranks everything else: turn a reader who liked your book into a reader you can reach again. That is it. A retailer knows who bought your book. Your publisher may know. You do not, unless the reader came to your site and gave you their email address.
Everything else on the site is in service of that, or it is decoration.
The newsletter is the whole thing
Writers resist this, understandably. It feels commercial in a way that writing does not, and there is a nagging sense that a real writer should not have to market.
But consider what actually happens on publication day. Without a list, you are announcing your book into the void and hoping an algorithm is kind. With a list of even a few thousand engaged readers who already liked your last book, you launch into a room that is already full, and first-week sales are the thing that determines whether a publisher backs you again.
So the sign-up is not tucked into the footer. It has a genuine reason to exist, a short story, a deleted chapter, a first look, and it appears where readers actually finish reading, not where the layout happened to leave a gap.
Book pages that do their job
Most author book pages are a cover image, a blurb, and a row of retailer buttons. That is a catalogue entry, not a sales page.
Put the first chapter on the page. This is the recommendation authors resist most and it is the one that works. Your writing is the single most persuasive asset you have, and hiding it behind a retailer link means the buying decision gets made on the strength of a cover and a two-hundred-word blurb, which is to say, on the least representative evidence available.
Add the things a reader genuinely wants and rarely gets: the content warnings if relevant, where it sits in a series and whether it can be read alone, the audiobook narrator, and reviews that are real. A book page written for the reader rather than for the retailer converts substantially better.
Novelists
Fiction readers are loyal in a way that is genuinely unusual, and a site that respects that loyalty is rewarded by it.
Series need a proper home: reading order made obvious (this is the single most common question fiction authors get, and most sites fail to answer it above the fold), a spoiler-safe overview, and a clear signal about what is finished and what is coming.
The most valuable thing you can offer a devoted reader is more of the world, a short story, a novella, a character sketch, something that does not exist anywhere else. It is also, conveniently, the most effective newsletter incentive in existence, because it is the one thing your readers cannot get from a retailer.
Non-fiction authors and speakers
For non-fiction, the book is frequently not the business. It is the credential that produces the speaking, the consulting and the teaching, and those are worth many multiples of the royalties.
So the site has to work considerably harder. A speaking page that makes booking you easy: what you speak about, the formats, real video of you actually on a stage, and a route to enquire that does not involve a generic contact form.
Event bookers are busy and they are risk-averse. They want to see you speak before they commit, they want the logistics answered without a phone call, and they want to know you will not be difficult. Every one of those anxieties can be addressed on a page, and almost no author site addresses any of them.
Self-published authors
Self-published authors are running a small publishing business, and the website is infrastructure rather than decoration. The stakes are correspondingly higher.
Direct sales are genuinely worth considering here, because the margin difference is substantial and, more importantly, you learn who your readers are. Selling signed copies and special editions direct while pointing everything else at the retailers is usually the right balance: you capture the superfans and their data without turning yourself into a fulfilment operation.
One warning, offered as someone who builds these: do not spend money on the website that should be spent on the cover and the editor. A brilliant site cannot rescue a book with an amateur cover. If the budget is finite, and it always is, the cover comes first, the editing comes second, and the site comes third. We will tell you that even though it costs us the larger project.
What an author website costs
Less than most authors fear, and more than the cheapest option, which is a template you configure yourself.
That template is a legitimate choice and for many authors it is the correct one. If you have one book, a modest budget and more time than money, use one, and spend the difference on the cover.
A custom author website earns its cost when there is a backlist to organise, a series to navigate, a shop selling signed copies, or commercial work to support: speaking enquiries, direct sales, or a launch you have staked something on. The test is whether the site has a job a template cannot do.