A Simpler Way for Authors to Create Websites
BookBub is best known in the author community as a promotional service that helps boost book sales, but we’re always exploring ways we can do more for authors. Today, we’re excited to share an early look at a new service we’re working on — an easy-to-use website builder designed exclusively for authors called Author Websites by BookBub.
Here is the ePubGuru implementation of Author Websites. It’s also linked at the bottom of my Bookshelf page.
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First, I created subdomain author.ePubGuru.com. This allowed me to extend my investment in the ePubGuru.com domain at no additional domain cost.
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BookBub automatically issued an SSL certificate for the subdomain along with their hosting service, leaving their nominal hosting fee as my only additional cost for this service.
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The content, which is automatically generated in the first instance and selectively editable thereafter, is hosted at BookBub, so the only material addition to ePubGuru.com was the subdomain and the link to the Author Website at same.
The Author Websites builder goes out and magically finds all of your published books, then uses the supporting materials you’ve published with them to flesh out the listings. These include the cover images, titles, subtitles, descriptions and links to all of the platform entries where customers can learn more about and buy each book. You can add to or remove these links, as the site builder may have missed one here and there or added duplicate entries it may have found on different platforms. By way of their easy-to-use interface, I removed two duplicate entries and added a link dedicated to the audiobook version of my Profound Accordance title. The only thing left to do was fill in any missing content as described above, for which Author Websites presents placeholders so you don’t miss any, and style the resulting Author Website to my liking. All I did to finalize the site was choose the website template and change the color palette (2 clicks).
It took a day or two for the site to go live and for the SSL certificate to propagate, so wait at least that long before troubling Customer Support with these issues. Additional services include email marketing lists, Google Analytics hookup and more.
As noted above, the content is hosted on BookBub but is automatically generated based on material you should already have on file for your books. They don’t (yet) offer site backups but that’s not too big a concern for this reason.
