What pages should an author website have? Five, and this is what goes on each

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

Most author websites aren’t ugly, and they aren’t broken. They’re fourteen pages deep, every page thin, and none of them pulling any weight.

Someone arrives from a podcast mention, sees a homepage saying “Welcome to my website”, scrolls past a carousel of three covers, finds a blog with two posts from 2023, and leaves. Nothing was wrong. Nothing did anything either.

An author website needs five pages: home, books, about, newsletter, contact. Everything else has to justify itself by taking work off one of those five, and most proposed sixth pages can’t.

Our author website essentials guide covers the same five pages as a short checklist, a few bullet points each, alongside the platform question (Carrd vs WordPress vs Shopify). This article is the expanded version of just that one section: the order elements go in above the fold, what to cut and why, the accessibility and disclosure rules that apply to buy links, and the tells that make a page read as amateur or abandoned. Start with essentials if you’re still choosing a platform; come here once you’re actually building the pages. Two more companion guides cover the neighbouring questions: author website cost for UK pricing, and author website SEO and AI discovery for ranking and answer engines.

The five pages and the single job each one does

A 2018 Nielsen Norman Group eyetracking study found people spend about 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold, 74% within the first two screenfuls (up to 2160px), and more than 65% of that above-fold time in the top half of the viewport. That’s a finding about where attention sits, not about how many buttons you should use. What it does tell you is blunt enough: whatever you most want seen has to be in the top half of the first screen, because everything below gets a fraction of the looking. One call to action per page is my own preference rather than anything the research proves, and the reasoning is simply that two buttons of equal weight make a reader choose, and choosing is where people leave.

Your visitors aren’t all on phones, either. StatCounter put UK desktop at 50.6% of page views in July 2026, mobile at 45.05% and tablet at 4.35%. That’s why step eight of the build order below asks you to open every page at 1440px as well as 390px. Half your audience sees the wide version, and wide is where a phone-first layout falls apart into one lonely column.

Home: a signpost, not a destination

The homepage routes people. Nobody finishes reading a homepage and buys a book because of it. They read it for three seconds, decide whether you write the sort of thing they read, and click.

What goes above the fold

Five elements, in this order down the screen:

1. Your name, as the site title, top left. Not a logo you paid for. Your name.
2. One line saying what you write, twelve words maximum. “Cosy crime set in a Yorkshire market town” beats “Author, dreamer, tea drinker”, because genre plus setting plus promise lets the right reader self-select in a second.
3. The cover of the book you want sold today, big enough that the title is legible at a glance. If the title on your cover is unreadable at 300px wide, that’s a cover problem rather than a website one.
4. One button, not four: “Read the first chapter”, “Buy the book”, or “Get the free novella”. Whichever you pick becomes the site’s primary action, and every other page should feed it.
5. A navigation bar of five items. Home, Books, About, Newsletter, Contact.

Below the fold, in this order: a short paragraph in your voice, two or three review quotes with real attribution, the newsletter box, then the covers of your other books. Stop there.

What to delete from the homepage

The rotating hero slider goes first. Erik Runyon’s tracking of five university and college homepages found the flagship nd.edu carousel got clicked by about 1% of visitors, with 84% of those clicks landing on the first slide. The other four sites he tracked did somewhat better — click-through rates of 1.7% to 8.8%, with 40% to 62% of clicks still landing on the first slide — but even the best-performing carousel sent well under 1 in 10 visitors anywhere at all, and on every site the first slide dominated the rest. Slides two onward are close to invisible on all five, and while they rotate they move the one message you wanted read out of view. Pick one cover.

After that: “Welcome to my website”, which nobody has ever needed telling. Autoplay video and background music, because a heavy hero video wrecks your Largest Contentful Paint, and Google’s threshold for a good LCP is 2.5 seconds or less at the 75th percentile of loads. Embedded social feeds, which load slowly, age quickly and exist to send your visitor somewhere else. The same goes for social icons in the header, which belong in the footer.

The books page, where the selling actually happens

Three books or fewer and one page listing all of them is right. Four or more and each book gets its own page, with the list page acting as an index. The threshold matters because a single page carrying eight books becomes a scroll nobody finishes, and because individual book pages give you somewhere specific to send an ad or a newsletter link.

Order books by what you want sold, not by publication date. For a series that means book one first, always, with a visible “Book 1 of 4” label.

Each book entry, in this order:

• Cover image, with real alt text. WCAG 1.1.1 is a Level A criterion and requires a text alternative that serves an equivalent purpose. “Cover of The Salt Road by Jane Fielding” is alt text. “book-cover-final-v3.jpg” isn’t.
• Title, series name and number.
• Two sentences of hook, not the full back-cover blurb, with a “read more” if you must.
• Formats and where to get them, stated plainly: paperback, Kindle, audiobook, library.
• Buy buttons.
• One review quote with a named source. An unattributed rave is worth nothing.
• The boring facts: page count, publication date, ISBN, publisher, content notes if needed. Readers, librarians and event bookers all look for these.

Buy links, the bit almost everyone gets wrong

Every external buy link should open in a new tab and should say so in the link text, and both halves matter. Opening in a new tab keeps your site alive behind the retailer, which is the entire point of having one. But an unannounced new tab is a change of context, which is why WCAG’s Success Criterion 3.2.5 (Level AAA) exists, and the accepted technique for handling it, H83, is to put the warning in the link text. So the label reads Buy on Amazon UK (opens in a new tab). It looks clumsy for about a day, then goes invisible.

Three more things belong on this page. If you’re wide, a universal book link saves you maintaining six buttons per title: Books2Read, run by Draft2Digital, routes each reader to their own retailer and country, and ALLi’s advice centre records Draft2Digital’s position that it’s free for everyone to use rather than D2D authors only. If you’re exclusive to KDP Select, skip it and link Amazon directly.

If you use affiliate links, disclose them properly. Amazon’s UK Associates Programme Operating Agreement requires you to state, clearly and prominently, “As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases” (as of August 2026 — Amazon can and does amend this agreement). The ASA separately expects affiliate content to be identifiable as advertising, labelled “Ad” or similar, and has warned that consumers are unlikely to recognise “Aff” used on its own. A disclosure buried in your footer is the version that gets you in trouble.

Bookshop.org runs an affiliate programme authors can join. Its UK support pages confirm anyone can become a UK affiliate, that affiliates must openly state the commission relationship on websites, newsletters and social media in line with ASA guidance, and that the minimum withdrawal balance is £20 (checked August 2026). Check the current commission rate on Bookshop.org itself before you build a case on it, because rates change and a number from a blog post isn’t a number.

Then set a quarterly reminder to click every buy link on the site. Retailer URLs rot, and a dead Amazon link is the quietest way to lose a reader you already paid to attract.

What to cut from the books page

Placeholder entries for books with no date. “Coming soon” with no month reads as abandoned, and after a year it says nobody maintains the site. Cut the individual page per short story too, and group them.

About, and why it isn’t your CV

After books, about is the page people go to next, and they arrive asking one question: should I trust this person with eight hours of my life?

Above the fold, put a photograph of you and the first two sentences. Those two sentences say why you, specifically, wrote this book. “I spent eleven years as a paramedic in south London before I wrote a word of fiction” does more work than three paragraphs about your love of storytelling since childhood.

Make the photograph a real one, of your face, taken this decade, looking roughly at the camera. Not a typewriter, not an artfully stacked pile of hardbacks, not a fountain pen on parchment. Not your dog, however good the dog is. Stock photography of writing paraphernalia is the loudest amateur signal on the internet, partly because you’ve already seen the same handful of images on every other author site. If you genuinely won’t put your face on the site, commission an illustration, or use nothing.

Then, in order: the credibility line (awards, prior career, publications, sales, whatever is true), one human detail that isn’t about writing, the region you live in, and a link to your newsletter. Four hundred words is plenty, and 250 is fine.

Write it in first person, and keep a short third-person paragraph underneath for anyone who needs to paste one into a programme or a podcast intro, labelled as such. A whole page written in the third person makes the site read like an obituary.

There’s a practical reason to get the bio right, which is that your Amazon author page needs the same asset. Amazon’s Follow button sits on your author page and your book detail pages, and Amazon tells followers when a new title is released or goes up for pre-order, provided the book is eligible, the follower accepts marketing emails from Amazon, and they haven’t already ordered it. Write it once, use it twice. The rest is in Amazon Author Central UK.

Your newsletter page is the only asset you keep

Every other page sends people somewhere you don’t control. This one doesn’t, which is why it deserves its own page even though the signup box also appears on the homepage and at the foot of every book page. Which platform you run it on is a separate question, covered in newsletter platform comparison.

Above the fold: what they get, how often, the form, and the incentive if you have one.

Be specific about all three. “Sign up for updates” asks for an email address and offers nothing in return, and it reads like exactly that trade. “An email when I publish a new book, about three times a year, plus the deleted first chapter of The Salt Road” tells someone what they’re agreeing to and what arrives now.

Then the part UK authors get wrong. You need consent, and you need to be able to evidence it. PECR 2003 regulation 22 says you must not transmit unsolicited direct marketing by electronic mail to an individual subscriber unless the recipient has previously notified you that they consent. There is a soft opt-in for people whose contact details you obtained in the course of a sale or negotiations for a sale of your own similar products, with a simple means of refusing offered when the details were collected and in every message since. Most authors can’t lean on it, because their readers bought from Amazon rather than from them. So: an unticked box, or a clearly worded single-purpose form, and an unsubscribe link in every email. Never a pre-ticked box.

Put a one-line privacy statement directly beneath the field, linked to your privacy page, saying what you’ll send and that they can leave whenever they like. It costs you nothing, and it answers the question a cautious reader is already asking.

Two fields, maximum: email, and first name if you genuinely personalise. Nobody needs your reader’s surname, country and favourite genre at the door. Whatever incentive you offer has to arrive automatically, because if the free novella turns up four days later when you get round to sending it by hand, you’ve built a machine that fails on the day it works. And don’t promise a monthly newsletter. Promise the frequency you’ll hit in a bad year, because an author who says “three or four emails a year” and sends four is more trustworthy than one who promises monthly and goes quiet in March.

Contact, and the legal bit nobody enjoys

One page. A form is fine as the preferred route, and it spares you the spam that comes with publishing an address as text, but only if you’ve tested it and it confirms both on screen and by email. An unconfirmed form is indistinguishable from a broken one. If you sell anything at all, though, the email address has to appear on the page as text as well, for reasons two paragraphs down.

Say what you will and won’t respond to. Three lines does it:

Press and events: yes, please use this form. Rights enquiries: my agent, [name], at [address]. Manuscript reading, blurb requests and “will you look at my book”: I’m afraid not.

That saves you more time than any other forty words on the site.

Now the legal bit. If your site is a commercial service in any sense, and selling signed copies, courses or ebooks direct counts, regulation 6 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 requires certain information to be available in a form that is “easily, directly and permanently accessible”: your name, the geographic address at which you are established, “the details of the service provider, including his electronic mail address, which make it possible to contact him rapidly”, and your VAT number where you have one. A contact form on its own does not meet that, which is why the address goes on the page as text. A purely promotional site sits in murkier territory, but a contact page carrying a name and a way to reach you is no hardship either way.

You also need a privacy notice, plus a cookie notice if you run tracking. The general setup for both is covered in author website essentials, so the only thing worth flagging here is that the law moved recently. PECR regulation 6 was replaced on 5 February 2026 by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, and the new Schedule A1 carries an exception for storing or accessing information solely to collect statistics about how your service is used with a view to making improvements, provided you give clear and comprehensive information about it, offer a simple free means of objecting, and don’t share the data except to help make those improvements. First-party analytics used only to improve your own site now has a route that doesn’t need a consent banner. Advertising and retargeting pixels don’t qualify, and if you’re never going to read the numbers, the cleanest position is to install nothing.

The sixth page, ranked

If you add one more, add it in this order.

1. Press kit. Cover files at print resolution, two author photos, a 50-word and a 150-word bio, ISBN and publication details, contact route. Build it once someone has asked for these things twice.
2. Free stuff. A landing page for the reader magnet, with no navigation on it, used as the destination for ads and podcast mentions.
3. Events. Only worth having while there’s a dated future event on it, and worth taking down the month the diary empties.
4. For schools, book clubs or libraries. Discussion questions, a reading guide, your fee and format for visits. For children’s authors and serious non-fiction, this is the page that generates income.
5. Blog, last and conditional. Publish three posts before you launch it and commit to one a month for twelve months, and if you can’t honestly say you will, don’t create the page. An abandoned blog is worse than no blog, and it’s usually the page search sends strangers to first.

The tells

These are the things that make a reader, a journalist or a festival programmer quietly downgrade you. Most take ten minutes to fix.

A sane build order

If you have a weekend and no site, work in this sequence, because it front-loads the things that are hard to change later.

1. Buy the domain in your author name, not the book title. Books stop being the current book.
2. Write the twelve-word line describing what you write. Everything else keys off it.
3. Set up the email list and get the signup form working, before you build a single page.
4. Build the books page first. It’s the one that does the selling.
5. Build home as a signpost to books and the newsletter.
6. Write about in first person in one sitting, then cut it by a third.
7. Contact, privacy notice, and the legal details.
8. Check every page at 390px wide and at 1440px. Click every external link.
9. Ask one person who isn’t a writer to find your latest book and reach a retailer. Watch without helping, then fix whatever made them pause.

Most authors can do all of that in a weekend, and if you’re pre-first-book you probably should. Nothing on the list needs a professional. If you’d rather not, we build them.

Where our interest lies

We charge £199 to build an author website, plus £15 a month for care and hosting, so read that build order knowing we’d be better off if you skipped it. When paying is worth it and when it isn’t is covered properly in author website SEO and AI discovery.

Our main business is book formatting rather than websites, and if you want a second opinion on your manuscript before spending anything, the free KDP readiness audit will give you one.

Related guides

• Author website essentials: Carrd vs WordPress vs Shopify
• What an author website should cost in the UK
• Author website SEO for AI discovery
• Newsletter platform comparison
• Amazon Author Central UK: the complete setup guide
• Selling direct from your website

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a website before my first book comes out?

Yes, but a small one. One page with your name, what you write, the cover or a “coming [month]” line with a real month in it, and a working newsletter signup. It exists to catch the people who hear about you before you have anything to sell. Build the other four pages the week the book goes on sale.

How many pages should an author website have?

Five, in the ordinary case. A sixth earns its place when someone outside your own head has asked for it twice: journalists asking for cover files earn you a press kit, school bookings earn you a schools page. Keep the navigation to five or six items whatever you do, because a nav bar that wraps onto two lines on a phone is a sign the site was built for you rather than for readers.

Should each book have its own page on an author website?

Three or fewer, one shared page. Four or more, one page each. Two situations catch people out. If you write under two pen names, don’t interleave them, because a reader who came for cosy crime shouldn’t scroll past horror covers to find book two. Give each name its own section, or its own site. And keep out-of-print or currently unavailable titles listed with an honest one-line note rather than deleting them, since those are exactly the titles people search for and fail to find.

Do I need a privacy policy and a cookie banner?

A privacy notice, yes, from the moment you collect an email address, and it should sit one click from every form. Whether you need a banner depends entirely on what you install, and the rules changed on 5 February 2026, which is covered in the contact section above.

Should buy buttons go to Amazon or a universal link?

Exclusive to KDP Select, link Amazon directly. Wide, a universal link is less to maintain. Either way, plan for the answer changing: books move in and out of Select, publishers take over the buy links on a title they’ve acquired, and the retailer URL you pasted in 2024 may now be a 404 or somebody else’s edition of the same book. Point your buttons at something you can update in one place, and re-click all of them every quarter.

What do I put on the site if I’ve only written one book?

The same five pages, just shorter. The books page carries one book with a proper hook, review quotes and buy links. About does more work than it ever will again, because with one book the reader is buying you. So does the newsletter, since everyone who arrives now is someone you can tell about book two.

Is an author blog worth the effort?

For most authors, no, and that energy belongs in the newsletter. Where a blog does pay is narrow: non-fiction authors whose readers search for the problem rather than the book, and authors with enough backlist to need new entry points from search. If that’s you, write posts that answer something a person would actually type, not news from the writing desk. One trick worth knowing is to publish your newsletter archive as web pages, since you’re writing the emails anyway and it gives search engines and answer engines something current to find.