Do authors need a website? Not always, and here's how to tell

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

Short version: if you’ve published one book, have no second in progress, no mailing list and no plans to sell direct, you can skip the website for now and nothing bad will happen. Set up Amazon Author Central instead, then spend the afternoon you saved on the next book.

That’s an awkward thing for us to publish, because we build author websites from £199, plus £15 a month to look after them. So read the “not yet” case below knowing it argues us out of money, and read the section on when to build knowing we benefit if you agree with it.

A website is a tool. Tools earn their place when there’s a job waiting for them, and most of this article is about working out which jobs you actually have.

Is Amazon Author Central enough on its own?

For a lot of first books, yes. Here’s the profile where a website doesn’t earn its keep yet:

• One book published, or one on the way
• No series, no sequel, nothing else drafted
• No newsletter, and no immediate plan to start one
• Selling on Amazon (and maybe a couple of other retailers), not direct
• No speaking, no school visits, no festival applications in flight

If that’s you, start with what a free Amazon Author Central profile already does: a bio, your claimed editions, sales rank, reviews and a follower count. Amazon.co.uk is one of six marketplaces with the full feature set, alongside .com, .de, .fr, .co.jp and .com.br, though two of Amazon’s seven published Author Central functions (Editorial Reviews and BookScan sales data) are marked US-only. We’ve set out the full feature list, verbatim, and what each function does, in Amazon Author Central vs your own author website — this article is about whether you need more than that yet, not what’s inside it.

The Follow button is the part authors underuse. Readers who follow you get notified about a new release or a pre-order, provided they’ve opted into Amazon’s marketing emails, and our Author Central setup guide covers the switch-on. The limit that matters here is ownership: nothing on Amazon’s published list of Author Central functions exports those followers, tells you who they are, or gives you a field for a site of your own. Author Central is built to keep a reader on Amazon, which is entirely reasonable of Amazon and useful to know before you treat it as your online home.

Goodreads fills part of the gap. Its Author Program lists “connect your blog” among the marketing tools you unlock by claiming your profile, so a blog or newsletter with a feed can surface on your Goodreads page without you touching it again.

Set your expectations for year one accordingly. A brand-new site has no search history and no backlinks, so its early traffic is close to zero unless you’re actively sending people to it — from the back of the book, a newsletter, or a link in your bio. In practice that means a new site converts people who already know your name rather than finding you new ones.

There’s also a cost that isn’t money. Abandoned author sites are everywhere, and a festival programmer who lands on a page whose newest post is from 2023 draws a conclusion you didn’t intend, which is why an unmaintained site is worse than no site at all.

What to do instead this month

1. Claim Author Central in the UK, add the bio and the photo, and claim every edition of the book so reviews and rank consolidate.
2. Join the Goodreads Author Program and fill in the profile properly.
3. Fix the book’s Amazon listing before you fix anything else: whether the cover is legible at thumbnail size, the description formatting, the categories, the keywords.
4. Buy the domain (see below).
5. Go and write.

Buy the domain even if you don’t build the site

This is the one thing to do early regardless. Your name, or your pen name, on a domain. Park it, point it nowhere, and forget about it.

Names get taken, and the awkward moment arrives when book three is doing well and someone else has yourname.co.uk.

The domain is also what gives you a sending address you control when the newsletter eventually starts. Google’s sender guidelines apply to everyone, not only to big senders: you must “Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your sending domains”, which you can do for a domain you own and cannot do for a free gmail.com address you send from through a newsletter platform. Starting on yourname@yourdomain.co.uk saves you moving your sending identity later, at the point where moving it costs you deliverability.

A domain on its own is the cheapest thing in this whole article. We’ve broken down the real annual numbers, renewal traps included, in what an author website really costs in the UK.

When is an author website worth it?

Here are the jobs that put real work on a website’s desk. One of them on its own usually means park the domain, and two or more means build.

You’ve got a second book

One book is a product. Two books are a backlist, and a backlist needs somewhere that shows the reading order, the boxset, the prequel novella and which one to start with. Amazon shows a customer the book they’re already looking at, and it won’t explain your series to them.

A single page listing the books in order, with the novella and the boxset placed where they belong, does most of that work. It is usually the cheapest page on an author site and the most-read.

You’re building an email list

You can start a newsletter without a website. Kit, for one, lets you connect a custom domain you already own or use a free Kit subdomain instead, and most platforms work along the same lines. If “I need a website first” is what’s stopping you, drop that and start the list today. Which platform to pick is a separate decision, covered in the newsletter platform guide, and what a list is actually worth over time is in author email list ROI.

The legal obligations arrive with the list whichever route you take. The ICO’s PECR guidance is blunt: “you must not send electronic mail marketing to individuals, unless: they have specifically consented to electronic mail from you; or they are an existing customer who bought (or negotiated to buy) a similar product or service from you in the past, and you gave them a simple way to opt out both when you first collected their details and in every message you have sent.” It also requires that you don’t conceal your identity and that every message carries a valid contact address.

The reason a list eventually pulls a website into existence is simpler than the compliance. A signup form needs a reason to exist around it: a free short story, a first chapter, a deleted scene, a map. That reason needs a page, and once you’ve got a page for the reader magnet, a page for the books and a page for contact, you have a website whether you called it one or not.

You’re selling direct

Selling from your own site is the only route where you keep close to the full price, and it comes with homework. Check the exclusivity first, because enrolling an ebook in KDP Select means, in Amazon’s words, “you give us the exclusive right to sell and distribute your Digital Book in digital format while your book is in KDP Select” for a 90-day term, and authors do build direct-sales pages for ebooks they aren’t permitted to sell there. Then check the tax, because it changes the moment you sell across a border: GOV.UK states that supplies of digital services to consumers outside the UK “are not liable to UK VAT. They may be liable to VAT in the country where the consumer is based.” The whole route, including the platforms that handle VAT for you, is in selling books direct from your website.

We’re formatters rather than accountants, so if you’re going to sell across borders, get fifteen minutes with one before you switch the button on.

People start asking you for links

The moment someone external wants to check you out, the question stops being philosophical. Some of the places that ask make it a hard requirement. Virtual Authors UK — the directory of UK children’s authors, illustrators and poets offering virtual school visits, free to list but open only to writers with at least one traditionally published book — has four required fields on its add-a-listing form: name, email, “Website page giving virtual visit details”, and a tick confirming your session details. It won’t take a self-published author at all, which is a useful data point in itself: some of the gatekeepers your book will meet hold a harder line than “have you got a website”. Blog tours ask at one remove: The Book Network’s tour guidelines tell participating bloggers to include “Author bio and working URL links to the author’s website and social media pages (if applicable)” in every post.

Where a form lets you, you can send an Amazon link instead. It’s a weaker answer than a page you control, where the bio, the photo, the sample chapter and the contact address sit together and none of it is surrounded by other authors’ books.

You want AI answers about you to come from something you wrote

Your Amazon author page can’t do this job. We checked amazon.co.uk’s robots.txt on 11 August 2026: it individually names and blanket-blocks (Disallow: /) GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Perplexity-User, meta-externalagent, Bytespider, cohere-ai, GrokBot, xAI-Grok and CCBot, among well over a hundred named user-agent blocks in total. We’re not citing an exact block count: two fetches of the same file minutes apart returned different totals, which is a sign of how often Amazon edits it rather than a measurement error on our part. Apple’s crawler (Applebot) and Bing’s aren’t named individually — they fall under the single wildcard block, which disallows a long list of specific account and checkout paths rather than the whole site. Goodreads is looser again, blocking GPTBot and CCBot but not Anthropic’s or Perplexity’s crawlers.

Google is the exception, and it’s the bit plenty of articles get wrong. Googlebot and Bingbot aren’t named anywhere in Amazon’s file, and Google’s own rule is that “To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements”, so your Amazon author page stays in play there. What the chatbots say about you is settled elsewhere, on pages their crawlers are allowed to fetch, which is the subject of author website SEO and AI discovery.

What a website will not do

It won’t sell books on its own. A site with no traffic is a leaflet in a locked room, and the traffic has to come from somewhere else: the back of your book, your newsletter, your ads, your press coverage.

It won’t fix a book that isn’t converting. We see this one a lot: sales stall, the author concludes they need a website, and the actual problem is a cover that turns to mush at thumbnail size, a description written as a plot summary, or categories that put a cosy mystery next to true crime. Fix the retail page first, and our free KDP readiness audit checks the mechanical side of that in a few minutes.

And it won’t maintain itself. If you know you won’t touch it, buy the domain, point it at a single page, and stop there.

The smallest site that does the job

When it is time, one page is enough. A blog and a media hub can wait until there’s a reason for them.

• Your name and what you write, in one line a stranger understands
• The book, with cover, one-paragraph pitch and buy links
• One email signup with a reason attached
• A short bio and a usable photo
• A contact route that isn’t a social DM
• The legal basics: privacy notice, and cookie handling if you add analytics

A second page for press and events can wait until someone asks. The platform-by-platform view of what to build it on is in author website essentials, and the running costs are in the cost guide.

Build, park or wait

Run through this as it stands today, not as you hope it looks in a year.

Wait if you have one book, no second in progress, no list, no direct sales and nobody asking for links. Claim Author Central, buy the domain, get on with writing.

Park if you expect any of the five triggers within six months. Domain registered, single holding page with your name, the book and an email address. An afternoon at most.

Build if two or more of the five triggers are already true: a second book exists or is close; you’re collecting email addresses; you want to sell direct; people are asking you for links; or you want AI answers about you to come from a page you wrote.

We charge from £199 to build an author website and £15 a month to keep it patched and backed up, and our main business is book formatting rather than websites. If you’re in the wait group, don’t buy one, from us or from anyone else. Buy the build when the site has a job on day one, not as a milestone you award yourself for finishing the manuscript.

Related guides

• Amazon Author Central vs your own author website — the full feature-by-feature comparison, if you want the detail rather than the yes/no
• Author website essentials: Carrd vs WordPress vs Shopify
• What an author website should cost in the UK
• Author website SEO for AI discovery
• Amazon Author Central UK: the complete setup guide
• Newsletter platform comparison
• Selling direct from your website

Frequently asked questions

Is an author website worth it?

Only when there’s a job waiting for it. At £199 upwards to build and £15 a month to run, it buys nothing if nothing is currently sending people to look you up, and the money goes further on the cover and the retail listing. It starts paying once it collects email addresses, explains a series, takes direct orders or answers the people asking you for a link. If two or more of those apply, build it.

When should an author start a website?

At book two, at the first newsletter signup, or the first time someone asks you for a link, whichever lands first. Before a debut launch the case is narrower: a holding page with your name, the cover and an email address covers it, unless you’re capturing pre-order signups or giving reviewers and bloggers somewhere to check you out. Buy the domain now either way, because that part is cheap and the name might not be there later.

Can ChatGPT see my Amazon author page?

Mostly not, but not every crawler. Amazon.co.uk’s robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish from the whole site, plus Common Crawl (checked 11 August 2026). It doesn’t name Apple’s or Bing’s crawlers individually, so Apple Intelligence and Bing-fed answers may draw on the page differently. Google works differently again: Googlebot isn’t blocked, so the page stays eligible to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. If you want a chatbot’s description of you to come from something you wrote, it has to sit on a page those crawlers are allowed to fetch.

What if someone already owns the domain for my author name?

Check what’s on it before you do anything else, because a parked page and a live business are different problems. If it’s genuinely in use, the usual fixes are a different top-level domain, adding “author” or “books” to the name, or using a middle initial. Whichever you pick, use it everywhere after that: on the book, on Author Central, on Goodreads, in your email signature. The domain only works if it matches how people already look for you.

Do I need a website if I write under a pen name?

It makes the domain more urgent, because pen names are chosen and can collide, and it makes the contact details fiddlier. PECR requires that you don’t conceal your identity and that you provide a valid contact address for opt-outs, so you need an address you’re willing to publish, which is what a service address or PO box is for. The wider question of running a name you weren’t born with is in our pen name strategy guide.