Set up your author website

A canonical author website is the one web address that every other profile, listing, and press mention can point back to. It does not need to be large. It needs to be yours, current, and easy to find when someone searches your name.

The bio page. One page at a stable address such as yoursite.com/about is the reference copy of who you are as an author. Retailer profiles, award entries, event programs, and library authority records all describe you in slightly different words; this page is where the correct version lives. It should state the name you publish under, any other names you have published under, where you live (as precisely as you are comfortable with), and what you have written, with the publisher and year for each book. If you share a name with another author, say so plainly: librarians and catalogers disambiguate names for a living and will thank you for the help. Put your three bio lengths and a downloadable headshot with its credit on the same page, so the page becomes the link you send instead of retyping the bio.

A page per book. Each book gets its own page with a stable address, so there is something specific to link to from a listing, a review, or a press mention.

An email address at your domain. An address such as you@yourname.com, rather than a free webmail address, is a small signal to journalists, podcast producers, booksellers, and librarians that you are who you say you are, and it survives changes of internet provider and publisher. Most registrars sell a mailbox or offer free forwarding to an existing inbox. Whichever you choose, the sending records known as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC (email authentication standards) need configuring, or your mail is more likely to be flagged as spam. Set it up before outreach begins, since the records take time to propagate.

Traditionally published authors sometimes assume the publisher's author page does the job. It helps, but it lives on the publisher's domain, follows the publisher's template, and usually shows only the titles the publisher controls; a site on your own domain outlives any single contract. Hybrid and self-published authors are already the publisher of record, so the website doubles as the publisher's official presence and retailers, librarians, and journalists will treat it as the source of truth.