Wordpress for an Author website?

You don't have to code to use WordPress. There's a whole group of bloggers, many of whom are also writers, who use WordPress, and it's worth tying in with them. We not only write nice things on each other's blogs, but there's the like button as well. It's nice because you can show that you've been to someone else's blog post, even if you didn't have anything intelligent to say. And we promote each other's stuff on Facebook and Twitter as well.

I won't kid you and say there's no learning curve to WordPress, but I'm not real tech-savvy, and I worked through it quickly. Now I usually just sit down and type the post straight onto my blog--no intervening write-up on Word required, a lot like my AW posts. You can type up drafts well in advance and they'll be saved.

If you go to my blog, you'll see I have everything organized into categories with index pages. But that's extra work that I chose to do. Lots of people just make their blog page the default when you go to their site. Add an interesting About Me section, a Books Published section, and you're in business.

If you do start a Wordpress site, I'll recommend you go to my blog for a completely different reason. Look at the people who liked and commented on my posts, and click on their names or icons to visit their blogs. Like and/or comment on their posts, and they'll do the same for you. It's way less depressing than posting for a couple months into a vaccuum and hoping you're not wasting your time.

But others have used other platforms as well. Tumblr seems to be popular. I can't really comment on how they work as promotion tools, though, because I've never used them. I will say I'm annoyed when I visit another platform. I have to sometimes say filler things just to show I reciprocated the visit, and that's an activity I try to avoid.

Yeah, Tumblr was the first that came to my mind, too. It all depends on what you want your site to achieve and how you want it to present stuff. Tumblr is great for changing content and networking, but if you want a site that's based on fised content but also presents new stuff, I think WordPress is a pretty good way to go.

There are levels to which you can engage with the tech, depending on skill and what you what your site to do. At beginner's level, it comes down to choosing a theme that's close to what you want the site to look like, adjusting it with the built-in customizer and installing a few standard plugins for extra functions and safety. Be sure to use a theme that doesn't hide all the good stuff behind a pay wall and is easy to customize, preferrably one with a good support community. Feel free to try a few before you settle on one. The backend theme search has been stripped down to where you can hardly set any useful options anymore, but you can google for lists of top themes for descriptions and stuff.

Most web hosts offer a very quick Wordpress installation wizard so it really is as easy as clicking it and logging in.

Wordpress works with "themes" that are basically well-developed site templates. (By and large, stick to themes available within the Wordpress theme selector, for security reasons.) Pick one you like and you can more or less start posting right away.

There are various tutorials online for the installation and people here can probably walk you through that if you need help.

As for alternatives, Google's Blogger is even quicker and easier, if (slightly) less flexible. There are others: Typepad, Tumblr and even About.Me can work for a quick and relatively simple personal page. There are also tools more advanced than Wordpress (Drupal, Joomla, etc.) that still don't involve building the site in HTML/CSS yourself.

As a non-coder, I find Wordpress is really good for learning some of the basic HTML and CSS mark-up in a safe place. There's very little you can permanently break and it has a massive user community posting tutorials and help forums all the time, so if you do want to dip your toe into coding, Wordpress is also a good choice. It's easily extendable, which is partly why it's so popular. Start small, get bigger if/when you want to.

WordPress can be pretty intimidating, I know, but it's not so bad once you get in and play around a little. If you really want a plug-and-play, I recommend Blogger, but just FYI I ended up moving my Blogger to WP after a few years so maybe it's just best to take the plunge now and dabble around in WP!

An alternative to Wordpress is Weebly (also no coding needed) which I first used a couple years ago. There isn't much of a learning curve at all and is very visual. You drag and drop different elements where you want them to go on the page which makes it super simple.

Daffyjkl said:

What about social media? I have absolutely no experience with Facebook, Twitter etc. What is the basic minimum for a decent social media presence?

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No such thing. Social media work best if you embrace them sincerely. So if one of them doesn't work for you and you just can't get the hang of it, people will notice and you're likely better off not engaging in that one at all than doing it half-heartedly.

This is where I trot out my two favorite people for WP and writers using social media.

Barb Drozdowich did my site redesign. She's got several books about blogging and social media for authors. Check her out at http://bakerviewconsulting.com/books/. I cannot say enough good stuff about working with her on my site.

Rachel Thompson was my imprint manager at Gravity, and is something of a social media SME. She's got a book called the 0-Day Book Marketing Challenge that takes you step-by-step through gearing up your social media presence for book marketing. She talks you through Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, among others, giving easy daily tasks to get yourself established. Also see her website at http://badredheadmedia.com

I think a self-hosted site using WOrdpress.org is the best way to go for most authors. You have fewer limits and many more tools available to you on a slef-hosted site as opposed to one at wordpress.com or weebly or similar sites.

AFA social media goes, Max has a great point about using what you're comfortable with. But you also need to use the ones your audience is using. If you're writing YA, you want to be on Snapchat, not Facebook.

One thing with social media is it's possible to use them in such a way that people have a place to find you but it doesn't look too weird if you're not posting all the time. So having a Facebook page (not profile, page) for your book is a good idea. Fill out the About sections and add a cover image. Even if you only post occasionally, it's still a thing that people can find if they check. Twitter can be the same way if you follow a few key people and tweet or retweet only occasionally.

I do very little posting on social media in general, but I'm there if people want to check who I am, which helps for networking and such.

mbalge said:

An alternative to Wordpress is Weebly (also no coding needed) which I first used a couple years ago. There isn't much of a learning curve at all and is very visual. You drag and drop different elements where you want them to go on the page which makes it super simple.

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I strongly do not recommend Weebly. You can't move you content easily. There's no automatic export.

Daffyjkl said:

Brilliant, thanks for the feedback. I have dabbled with Wordpress in the past, so it isn't totally alien to me, I was just wondering if there was something better out there. I will give it another chance. Thanks again.

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WordPress is solid. I really like a lot about it. If you've got cash, SquareSpace has a lot to offer, but it's pricey.

VeryBigBeard said:

So having a Facebook page (not profile, page) for your book is a good idea.

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Yes to the first. No to the bold. Brand the author, not the book. If you make a new Page for each book, you'll end up maintaining a bunch of Pages, and that will take more time than it's worth.