Author website importance for readers & writers has never been more evident in the ever-shifting social media platforms, the menacing search engines, and the overall online thicket of a book-verse in the 21st century.
Why is it vital for authors to have a presence online?
Even the world’s greatest authors have written books and new readers wish to find those books, or age-old Constant Readers of Stephen King – for example – wish to read the premise or release dates of those books that they have not read (or reread) yet.
DuckDuckGo is a fickle beast (as are Google and Bing), and we should not have to let the search engine algorithms online determine who sees our body of work and what they body of work is made of (let alone how it is presented).
As an avid reader I look up an author, by name, in a search engine weekly, hell, sometimes daily, to find out which of their books I forgot to read, or to see when their next excellent work will be coming out (will they be signing, please and thank you, and will there be a book tour and readings of unheard words in all their glory).
This can be a difficult endeavor for a reader, as many authors do not yet have a website.
Wikipedia is a great starting point for research, but is littered with inaccuracies and rarely tells the whole story, or in this case stories in all the books and works of an author.
Many writers traverse social media, because we are people, just like everyone else, and many people are on social media (a few billion or thereabouts).
But some social networks are restrictive in what you can see and others that appeared stable beacons for voices (and Tweets) for decades quickly crumble under the weight of heavy-handed corporate-ness, while others bloom and grow so swiftly it is as if they sprouted from dandelions on the wind.
Look your name up and see what you see.
The best thing to happen is for yourname.com to show up at the top and your curated books to appear there as you want them to…
Read the Rest of this article on my SUBSTACK here.
“Author Website Importance For Readers & Writers” was originally published on 5.8.2023 at Substack.