Give your author website a new year refresh
Happy New Year! I hope you are as excited about 2020 as I am. I love this time of year – all the optimism and renewed energy and promises to make positive changes! Much as I LOVE Christmas (like really, really love it), I also love it when the Christmas tree comes down and suddenly your house looks about ten times bigger.
So, in the spirit of decluttering and starting afresh, I thought it might be useful to share some tips on how you can get your author website looking shiny and new for the new year.
These are all super simple, easily actionable changes – tick them off one by one and you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something without too much effort. The perfect way to ease yourself into your writing year…
1 Update your copyright bar
Let’s start with the easiest one. Do you have a copyright year in your footer (see my footer below for an example)? If not, you should have! But if you do, make sure it says 2020, not 2019, or 2018 or 2015 or worse…
And on that note, if your website hasn’t been updated for more than five years, it’s probably time to show it some love and attention. Web design is a fast-paced world, and five-year-old designs (or older) will likely be showing their age now. Whether that’s because they aren’t mobile responsive (increasingly important) or because they don’t have an SSL certificate, or because the design just looks… well, old. Is 2020 the year to bring your website into the new decade? If so and you want help with it – well, you know where I am!
2 Update your bio
You probably added your author bio to your site when you set it up, and haven’t touched it since. But it’s worth reading it over quickly to check nothing has changed. Are you now writing full-time, having given up your part-time job? Have you moved to a different area? Got a film deal?!
Depending on how old your bio is, you might also want to think about getting new headshots done. There’s nothing more cringeworthy than an author who turns up at an event and looks absolutely nothing like their 20-year-old profile picture. Sorry. Bite the bullet and book that photographer. (Yes, I know, I hate having my photo taken too!).
3 Add in any new quotes/press
Press reviews and author blurbs mostly come in around publication time in one big rush, but you will probably find a trickle continue to appear in the weeks and months afterwards. It’s worth checking that you haven’t left any of these off your website (which you might have lavished time on in your publication month, and ignored ever since).
Make sure all your most glowing and lovely quotes are on your website, and displayed in a way that makes the most of them (top tip: don’t confine them all to one page – sprinkle them around the site for maximum impact!)
Bonus: this is much more fun than getting author photos done, and re-reading all your lovely reviews and testimonials will remind you why you do this very difficult job!
4 Add in any new books/pre-order links
Quite an obvious one, but are all your existing and available books actually ON your website? If not, add them in! And don’t forget to tease your fans with news of any upcoming titles.
Even if you don’t have a cover to share yet, you can definitely flag that your next book is coming soon. And if there’s already a listing on Amazon for it, make sure you link to it to encourage people to pre-order and build excitement.
5 Refresh your Events page
This is probably one of the things that authors forget to update the most! I quite often visit author websites only to read on their homepage that they’ll be appearing at Great Crime Writing Event in 2016! This makes it look as though a) you haven’t done anything since or worse still, b) you just don’t care!
Not promoting any events on your website is a massively missed opportunity but at the same time having really out-of-date events listed looks even worse. Make sure you regularly update your events page, if you have one – make a reminder in your calendar if you need to!
6 Check your Contact page
Last but not least – an easy one to fix. Check your Contact page has all your relevant business contacts listed. Have you changed agents? Or publishers? Has the publicist at your publishers changed? Make sure you update these with the right people.
Also, double check that your contact form still works, and if you list social media links on your website, that they are still correct. People quite often change their social media handles but forget to update these links elsewhere.
And that’s it. Short but sweet checks that will make a big difference! Why not get them done today?
