Photo by Underwhelmer
Do you dream of writing the Great American Novel? Of adoring fans and endless royalty checks? Do you wistfully imagine your picture on the back cover of a NYT Bestseller?
These days, just writing the book isn’t enough. There’s a lot of competition out there vying for that publisher’s attention.
To help land a publishing contract, a lot of writers are creating author websites to help build their fan-base and create a buzz. Thank goodness for the Internet, huh?
Today’s case study shows how to use WordPress to create a simple author website.
Case Study: ChroniclesOfSilence.com
Scott is a published non-fiction author, but this is his first attempt to publish a novel. Chronicles of Silence is meant for the young adult audience and is an exciting action story based upon the only female Knight of the Round Table.
Scott’s main business is the Chivalry Today Educational Program, where he shows how the Code of Chivalry can be an excellent guide for modern behavior. It wasn’t a far leap for his interest in the Middle Ages and the Code of Chivalry to lead to a novel, as well.
ChroniclesOfSilence.com Home Page
To create some separation between this new book and his regular business, Scott asked me to create a simple website just for his novel.
Site Planning
The first step was to map out how he wanted the site to flow. What pages and information did he want to display? Scott decided on the following:
- Static home Page featuring information about the setting and how his idea for the book came about
- About the Author page
- Contact Page
- Sidebar links:
- excerpt
- fan art gallery
- information about female knights
Follow these step by step instructions to create a quick site like Scott’s.
Step 1: Create Pages
Remember, Pages are different than Posts. See the Post vs. Page article for a complete breakdown of how they are different.
Adding a New Page
- Go to Pages>>Add New
- Create a Page for home page
- Go to Pages>>Add New
- Create a Page for the blog
- Repeat steps for About and Contact Pages
- Don’t forget to hit “Publish”
Step 2: Static Home Page
Setting a Static Home Page
- Go to Settings>>Reading
- Under Front Page Displays, choose “A Static Page”
- Select correct Page from dropdown
- Select correct Page for blog from dropdown
- Click Save Changes at bottom of screen
Step 3: Create Sidebar Links
Scott wanted these links to go to a category, rather than an individual post, so that he could add additional information later. To achieve this, we took the following steps:
Manage Categories Page
- Go to Posts>>Categories
- Create a category and click the Add Category button at the bottom
- Repeat for each category
Adding a Widget
- Go to Appearance>>Widgets
- Drag the Categories Widget to your Sidebar
- Enter the widget Title and click “Save”
Create Posts
Now that we’ve created these lovely sidebar links, we need to put something there for people to see when they click on them!
Add New Post page
- Go to Posts>>Add New
- Add a Title in the top box
- Create your post in the main edit box
- Select the category on the right side
- Save by clicking the Publish button
- Repeat to create posts for each category
Summary
As you can see, the steps to create a simple Author’s Website are pretty quick and easy. Many more features can be added with not much more effort. It takes a lot longer to compose the Post and Page content than it does to create the site itself.
Questions?
What are your questions about creating an author website? Do you plan to create a website for your novel or book? Leave a comment and let’s talk about it!
A Clever Cat did a great job with our website upgrade - the redesign and change-over was quick and easy, and the result is a new website that gives our program a much more impressive on-line image. The new website will be an effective new tool in our promotional campaign, and I have every confidence that A Clever Cat will be there for us to answer questions, incorporate new features and keep our website looking state-of-the-art as we go. 
