Author website examples: 12 UK authors' sites, pulled apart

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

We build author websites, so read this as a review by an interested party. Three things should keep it straight: every site is named, every observation was on the page on the day, and the section on cost tells you when doing it yourself beats paying us.

Twelve examples of author website design in the UK, all read on 5 August 2026: Joanne Harris, Ian Rankin, Kate Mosse, Clare Mackintosh, Val McDermid, Peter James, Elly Griffiths, Mark Dawson, LJ Ross, Joanna Penn, Bernardine Evaristo and Michael Rosen.

Three of them were showing something visibly out of date. That turned out to be the finding.

Method, because it matters here. Each site was fetched and read in full that day, page and markup, which is why I write “read” and not “saw”. Nothing was speed-tested. I’m reviewing the sites, not the authors and not the books. If something has moved by the time you read this, that’s the site doing its job.

The four jobs an author website has to do

1. Prove you’re the real one. Somebody has heard your name and is checking whether the person in their inbox is you.
2. Sell the book that’s out now. A reader who has just heard of you wants the current title, with somewhere to buy it, on the first screen.
3. Capture the reader before they leave. Your mailing list is the one audience nobody else can switch off, reprice or bury in an algorithm change.
4. Answer the professional enquiry. Festival programmers, journalists, school librarians and rights buyers arrive looking for one specific thing. Make it easy to find, or they email somebody else.

Everything after that is discretionary. I’m not scoring the twelve out of four: several almost certainly do things that weren’t visible on the page I read, so what follows is what stood out. For the build checklist instead of the review, see author website essentials.

12 author website examples at a glance

One data point from the list itself: seven of the twelve are on a .com, four on a .co.uk, and Ian Rankin’s is a .net. If you’re still choosing, the decision is worked through in what an author website really costs in the UK.

Joanne Harris

The homepage sells Sleepers in the Snow by listing five things to expect from it: a giant electricity pylon, a haunted wardrobe, recurring tennis balls, a Neolithic coffin route and a demon dog. A novelist wrote that, and it does more work than any jacket blurb would.

The buy links go to Amazon UK, two named independent bookshops (Tea Leaves & Reads and The Cleeve Bookshop) and Pegasus Books for American readers. We could not confirm Tea Leaves & Reads’ location from Joanne Harris’s own site — the town name doesn’t appear on the page, only the bookshop’s name and domain — so we’ve dropped it rather than repeat an unconfirmed detail about a named third party. The framing is what makes it the best buy section in the sample: “get your signed, wrapped copy from an indie bookshop here!” That’s a specific, named reason to click past Amazon toward an indie — Val McDermid, Mark Dawson and LJ Ross all give readers somewhere else to buy too, but nobody else in the sample routes them to a named local bookshop the way this does.

Her events carry years, which sounds like nothing until you read the next two reviews: Toppings in Bath on 5 October 2026, Henley LitFest on the 6th, Booka Bookshop in Oswestry on the 7th. The layout is a two-column blog design and looks it, which is rather the point. None of the reasons a reader clicks depend on the template.

Ian Rankin, and what a publisher’s budget buys

The footer reads “© The Orion Publishing Group Ltd” — Orion is Rankin’s publisher, part of Hachette UK — and the professionalism shows. Above the fold is The Heights, a standalone due October 2026, with a pre-order link, alongside a 1,000-piece jigsaw of Rebus’s Edinburgh, and a carousel of backlist covers underneath.

The detail worth lifting sits in the About menu: a page giving the Rebus novels in order, alongside “Rankin’s Edinburgh” and “Creating Rebus.” Rankin’s site treats reading order as a question deserving its own named page, where most series sites leave you to work it out from a grid of covers.

The navigation nests into submenus, which is a lot of hovering on a phone. And the newsletter form asks you to confirm you’re 13 or over before it takes your address: a sound precaution on a site that reaches younger readers, and one more step between a reader and your list.

Kate Mosse keeps it to five pages

Home, About, Books, Events, Contact. Signature logo, generous white space, and a welcome written in the first person about Borderlands, which she describes as her first return to a medieval and modern time-slip thriller since Labyrinth twenty years ago. It reads like a note from the author.

That paragraph is the whole argument for minimal sites. One honest, specific piece of writing establishes more authority than three screens of design.

There were no retailer links on the homepage. For a novelist with Mosse’s reach and a publisher’s marketing behind every release, that’s a defensible trade. For a self-published author whose only route to a sale is the link they control, it isn’t.

Clare Mackintosh: the credentials stack, and the year problem

The hero is efficient. It carries the new novel, endorsements from Paula Hawkins and Lee Child, and a credentials strip: three million copies sold, New York Times bestseller, number one Sunday Times bestseller. A stranger knows immediately whether this author is a big deal. There’s a media pack for press and programmers, which is the fourth job done properly, and a free short story for joining the mailing list.

The events page is where it slips, in the most common way there is. A long list sits under “Upcoming Events”, running from a Monday 23rd March to a Saturday 18th July. Not one entry shows a year. Those weekday-and-date pairs fit 2026, and they also fit 2020, so I can’t tell you which was meant. Either way, every date on the list had already passed by 5 August 2026.

I’m not being sniffy. It happens to almost every author site between books, because touring is exhausting and the website is last on the list. The fix is small: print the year, and archive past events automatically or drop the page from the nav until there’s something on it.

Val McDermid has written the paragraph nobody else has

Down the page sits a notice I haven’t found on another author site: “Please be aware that scammers sometimes impersonate authors, including Val McDermid. If you receive an unsolicited email claiming to be from Val McDermid, it is fraudulent.” It points readers to the contact page to verify anything genuine.

That is the first job taken seriously, and it costs one paragraph. If you have readers who’d be thrilled to hear from you personally, you have readers who can be defrauded by somebody pretending to be you.

The rest is clean navy-and-white, the navigation split by series (Karen Pirie, Allie Burns, Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, Kate Brannigan, Lindsay Gordon, standalones), with buy buttons going to a cart on the site instead of out to a retailer. The homepage events were dated 4, 5, 10 and 11 February 2026, six months gone by the day I read it.

Peter James lists nine retailers

Amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, the Steyning Bookshop and City Books in Hove — an independent that’s been shortlisted twice for Independent Bookshop of the Year, and one James has written about by name elsewhere on his own site. Two local independents sitting in the same list as four supermarkets, and the set reflects how mass-market crime fiction actually sells in Britain. It’s the most complete run of buy links across the twelve.

The navigation goes well beyond books: the ITV Grace adaptation, stage plays, a video channel, media, charity. When your work exists in five formats, the site’s job is to be the switchboard.

The hero button, on “THE HAWK IS DEAD | PAPERBACK OUT NOW!”, pointed at Amazon. The most valuable click on a site that lists nine retailers goes to one of them by default.

Elly Griffiths

Four series are laid out separately (the Ruth Galloway novels, the Brighton Mysteries, the Ali Dawson mysteries and A Girl Called Justice), with standalones alongside and a grid of covers below. Her other name, Domenica de Rosa, sits in the main navigation instead of being tucked away, under a line saying simply that she also writes under it. Any author working with two names should do this: name both, link both, explain neither at length.

Then there’s an embedded Twitter feed on the homepage. On 5 August 2026 its most recent post was dated June 2025. More than a year of visible silence, in a box, on the front page.

This is the widget most likely to hurt you, because it fails loudly. A quiet page just sits there; a social feed with a year-old post announces that the author has stopped. Link the profile instead, unless you post weekly.

Mark Dawson’s homepage is a shop

The first thing the page asks for is your email address, in exchange for the Mark Dawson Starter Library. That’s the opening move, before any menu or bio.

Underneath it’s a Shopify store: books grouped by series (John Milton, Atticus Priest, Beatrix Rose, Isabella Rose), individual titles running £1.99 to £4.99 on the day I read it, a signed starter bundle at £7.99, and a country selector so overseas readers see their own currency. Selling direct means you keep more of each sale and you own the customer record, which is the argument set out in selling direct from your website.

There was no bio text and no contact route on the homepage, though About is in the main nav. A journalist or festival programmer landing there still has to click through and hunt, and there’s no Contact link anywhere in the nav or footer. A clearly linked Contact page is the piece missing if you build this way.

LJ Ross

Six series are set out as separate categories on the homepage, which is the right structure for a large backlist. The detail I liked most is a printable complete booklist as a PDF. I’ve no data on how many readers print it, but a checklist you can put in a coat pocket is a different object from a web page.

The signup form says the service is free and that details will never be shared, a small reassurance most forms skip. There’s a publicist’s email address too, so professional enquiries land in the right inbox.

The shop sits on a separate domain, so a reader who clicks “shop” leaves the brand they came for and arrives somewhere that has to earn their trust again, at the exact moment they were about to pay. Starting from scratch, keep it on the main domain.

Joanna Penn

“Hello, Creative.” Then a plain account of going from miserable IT consultant to more than 40 books across multiple genres and a million books sold. The free Author Blueprint is offered twice on the homepage, the podcast is weekly, and the newest blog post was dated 5 August 2026, the day I read it. Publishing on the day someone visits is the most convincing signal a site can send.

The top-level navigation runs Start Here, Shop, Books, Podcast, Blog, Community, Tools, About, Contact. That is a lot of doors. It’s also the honest shape of a business built on one domain over nearly two decades, where each item was added because a product already existed behind it.

Bernardine Evaristo and the annual round-up

The structural idea here is an Annual Round-Up, published each year and archived back to 2019. It turns a site that would otherwise need constant tending into one substantial update a year, and builds a public record of a career as it goes. For an author who writes slowly or works across forms, that beats a blog nobody finishes.

The rest is a portfolio: honours, reviews, tours, drama, essays, prize juries, teaching. Books appear as a grid of covers linking to their own pages. There were no retailer links on the homepage, so a reader who has just heard Girl, Woman, Other mentioned on the radio isn’t caught at the moment of impulse.

Michael Rosen: the archive is the asset

Ten navigation items sit flat across the top: Home, About, Videos, Books, Events, News, Blog, Audio, For Adults, Contact. Behind them is a genuinely deep archive, including a comprehensive bibliography the site says he compiled himself. The copyright line runs from 2005, which at minimum means two decades on the same domain.

Ten equal links tell a visitor nothing about what to do first. A teacher, a festival organiser and a parent arrive wanting different things and get the same undifferentiated row. Three or four clear routes, with the rest in the footer, would move more people to the right place without touching the content underneath.

What goes wrong with author websites

Three of these twelve sites, all of them professional and well made, were showing something out of date on 5 August 2026: Clare Mackintosh’s undated March-to-July event list, Val McDermid’s February dates on the homepage, and Elly Griffiths’s social feed, more than a year cold. That’s a quarter of a sample of well-resourced, well-known authors.

Author websites don’t break. They go stale, and stale is close to invisible to the person who built it, because they never arrive at their own homepage cold.

So the planning question worth asking is how small the site has to be for you to keep it true. The answer is almost always smaller than what gets built.

What to copy from the best author websites

In the order I’d do them.

1. One page for the current book, with every buy link on it. Amazon, Waterstones, Bookshop.org, your own signed copies if you sell them. Peter James’s nine beats a single button.
2. The year on every date. Events, news, everything. It’s the cheapest difference between a site that looks tended and one that looks abandoned.
3. A newsletter offer with something in it. Clare Mackintosh’s free short story and Mark Dawson’s starter library both give a reason to hand over an address. “Sign up for updates” gives none. Platform choice is a separate question, covered in the newsletter platform comparison.
4. A reading-order page, named as such, if you write a series. Rankin’s is the model: a page that answers the question in its own title.
5. A contact route that names who handles what. Publicist, agent, school visits, rights. LJ Ross lists a publicist address; Clare Mackintosh has a media pack. A programmer who has to hunt for a way to reach you books somebody else instead.
6. A hundred words in your own voice on the homepage. Kate Mosse’s welcome and Joanne Harris’s demon dog do more than any hero image.
7. A line about impersonation, as Val McDermid has. One paragraph, and it protects the readers most inclined to trust you.
8. An annual round-up instead of a blog, if you know you won’t blog. Bernardine Evaristo’s archive proves the model.

Author website features to skip

Everything here is on the list because it cost one of these twelve sites something.

A social feed you can’t feed weekly, which is worse than no feed at all once it goes quiet on the front page. An events page nobody prunes. A shop on a second domain, until direct sales are big enough to justify the split. A blog you won’t write.

One technical note in the same spirit. Google’s documentation says it indexes and ranks the mobile version of a page, crawled with the smartphone agent: “Only the content shown on the mobile site is used for indexing.” So if your desktop homepage carries an author bio and your mobile build drops it, the version Google reads is the one without the bio.

What an author website costs, and our stake in it

I said at the top that we sell these, so here’s the version that loses us the sale.

You can do this yourself. A hosted site builder on a paid plan plus a domain name will get you a perfectly good five-page author site, and the platform-by-platform numbers are set out in what an author website really costs in the UK. Check the provider’s own pricing page before you commit, because their plans change more often than the advice about them does. The software is the cheap part. The upkeep is the real cost, and nobody invoices you for it, which is exactly why it doesn’t get done.

If you’d rather not, we build author websites for £199 plus £15 a month to keep it live and supported, and the second number is the part that matters. Our formatting service is separate: if Amazon turns a book down on a formatting issue, we fix it free. And if you want to know where your files stand before spending anything, the free KDP readiness audit is a 60-second check with no payment and no signup.

Either way the checklist above is the same. The smallest site you’ll actually maintain will beat the ambitious one you won’t.

Related guides

• Author Website Essentials: Carrd vs WordPress vs Shopify (2026 UK Guide)
• Author Website Cost UK 2026: DIY vs Done-For-You
• Author Website SEO for AI Search: What Your Site Can and Cannot Do
• Amazon Author Central UK: Complete Setup Guide for Self-Published Authors
• Selling Your Book on Bookshop.org as an Indie Author (2026)

External references

• Google Search Central, mobile-first indexing
• Retail Technology Innovation Hub, Bookshop.org UK hits £5 million in profit for indie bookshops, 14 April 2026

Frequently asked questions

Should I link to Amazon or to independent bookshops from my own site?

Both, in the same row. My view, and it’s a judgement not a measurement: leaving Amazon off costs you sales without making much of a point, because the readers who default to Amazon will get there anyway. Adding Waterstones, Bookshop.org and a named local shop costs one line of HTML and gives the readers who care about that a reason to click. Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported on 14 April 2026 that Bookshop.org UK had passed £5 million in profit for independent bookshops since its 2020 launch, across more than 650 shops, so it’s a real option and not a gesture. Joanne Harris’s site does the strongest version of this: signed, wrapped copies through two named indies, alongside the Amazon link. To get your own book listed there, start with selling your book on Bookshop.org.

Are publisher-built author websites better than self-built ones?

The two most instructive sites here sit on opposite sides of that line. Ian Rankin’s is credited in the footer to Orion, his publisher (part of Hachette UK), and it shows in the polish, the pre-order link and the reading-order page. Joanne Harris’s is author-run on an ageing two-column layout, and it has the strongest buy section of the twelve. A publisher’s budget buys structure and, more to the point, somebody whose job includes updating the site. What it can’t buy is the five-line description of a demon dog, and that’s the part readers respond to.

Where should a series reading order live?

On its own page, named for the question a reader would ask. Rankin’s site has a page giving the Rebus novels in order, reachable from the About menu. Most series sites make you infer the order from a grid of covers or from publication dates on individual book pages, which is work you’re asking a stranger to do before they’ve bought anything. If you write more than three books in a sequence, build it early.

What do the strongest homepages here have in common?

Five things: who you are in a sentence, the current book with somewhere to buy it, a newsletter signup with a reason attached, your next few events if you have any, and a contact route. The two sites in this sample with no buy link on the homepage, Kate Mosse’s and Bernardine Evaristo’s, were also the two where I couldn’t work out what the author wanted me to do next.

Do I need a blog on my author website?

Only if you’ll keep it going. An abandoned blog is worse than no blog, because the newest post’s date is visible and tells everyone when you stopped. If you want the benefit without the commitment, use Bernardine Evaristo’s approach: one substantial round-up a year, archived by date. It reads as deliberate, and it gives search engines something new to index without demanding weekly output.