How To Set Up Your Author Website To Attract Readers And Sell Books

Let me ask you a question…are you selling books on your author website? Or are you still waiting to make your first sale? Okay, that was two questions. 🙂

Your author website should have essential pages like a shop page and book page. And if it does and you’re still not making any sales, your site might require a tweak or two to make those relevant pages of your website be visible to your audience.

And if you have a WordPress website, there are some unique ways to showcase your books and encourage visitors to buy a copy.

How To Set Up Your Website To Attract Readers and Sell Books

If you’re still waiting to make the first book sale on your author website, try the following suggestions to set up your site to attract readers and sell books.

Let’s start with showcasing your book or books.

3 Different Ways To Showcase Your Book(s)

There are a three ways creative ways to showcase your book.

#1 You can set up individual pages for your books that includes an synopsis, reviews and a link to retailers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble online or your site’s shop page.

#2 Or you can create a landing page or pop up for your shop page. The Hustle plugin by WPMU DEV gives you those features as well as other marketing tools you can use to promote your book. They have a premium version of the plugin as well but the free one will work just fine.

#3 You can also set up an book excerpt page to share a chapter of your book. For my client’s websites, I used the Interactive 3D Flipbook plugin. You can see it in action here.

Now let’s talk about your shop page.

The Best Places On Your Site To Display The Shop Page To Sell Books

As your visitor scrolls down through your website, you want to make sure they see a buy now option or link to the shop page for your book throughout their scrolling.

There are 4 places on the website I like to make the “buy now” button or link to the shop page visible.

The first is on the navigation bar.

As soon as a visitor lands on your website they’ll look to the navigation bar to guide them through your website. So it makes sense to place a link to your shop page there.

Extra tip: I learned that it’s good to have the most important links starting on the left since we read left to right. So, you should place the shop link more toward the left.

Here’s the way the top nav bar on my Not Now Mom’s Busy site is set up:

Another is at the footer of the website.

Simply create a graphic and link it to the shop page on your website. Use Canva to put an eye-catching graphic together. If you’re stuck for an idea, they have plenty of templates you can use.

A couple more places…

If your website set up includes a sidebar you can also place the graphic there but be sure to place it toward the top, like after your follow buttons.

And if your theme supports an “after entry” widget, you can place a graphic in that widget area and it will show up on every page and post of your website.

And There You Have It

Those are my suggestions for attracting people to attract readers and sell books on your author website. I hope these were helpful to you. And if you have other suggestions, share them in the comments below!