So you built that author website when you published your first book. Now you have a second (or third or fourth) coming out. Do you need to scrap that old site entirely? Probably not. Here are the five steps to updating your author website when you are adding a new book.
Tips for Adding a New Book
1. Consider the domain and design. Was your original site designed for your first book? Or was it more broad, focusing on you as an author? If the answer is the former, you may have some work on your hands. In other words, if the site was named after your first book and uses all the images/photography/colors from that first book cover, you really should consider some rebranding of the site before adding a new book. That might mean changing the domain name, imagery and/or the color scheme. This is why I frequently advise authors that unless this book is the only thing they are ever going to write, they should build a site that can easily encompass future books as well.
2. Reorganize your homepage. Your homepage is probably built to promote your first book. Maybe it includes the book cover, a blurb about the book, a testimonial or two and links to learn more. Now that you have another book out, you may decide that you want to give the homepage a similar treatment, but with more prominence for your new book. Or you may decide that you want a rotating slider on the homepage that features one book at a time but shifts from one to another. A third option is to have the homepage include a blurb about you and what you write about (assuming both books can fall under the same umbrella) and then call out each book as a subset of that larger message. Either way, you want to make sure your newest title gets the prominence it deserves on your homepage.
3. Adjust your book promo/buy the book modules. You probably have a header bar, a right rail or a footer that appears on every page of the site and includes some sort of book call-out. Often it includes the cover, links to learn more about it and/or a “buy the book” link. But now you have two (or more) books to feature. So you may want to consider either adding a new book to that module, or redesigning it so that it can naturally encompass more than one title. In some cases, that means making the first cover smaller and giving the newer title more prominence.
4. Add a new book page. This one is obvious, but it’s not to be forgotten. Each book you write deserves its own page on the site. Take a look at what you have for your first book and replicate it for the second. Maybe it’s a page that includes a detailed book description, a link to a featured excerpt, testimonials, etc… Aim to populate as much of that content as possible on your new book page as well. You may not have all that information handy yet (testimonials aren’t always readily available pre-pub), but you can always add them later. And if your first book has all of that information divided into multiple pages on the site, you may want to consider combining it all. Now that you’re a multi-book author, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to find all the information for an individual title in one place.
5. Restructure your navigation. Chances are, when you built the navigation on your site, you didn’t have a page title that matched the first book title. In other words, if your first book was called “Rose Petals” you may not have literally had a page called “Rose Petals.” You may instead have had a page called “About the book” or “Featured excerpts.” Now that you are adding a new book, you will need to clearly retitle each book page so that it matches the book title. You might also want to consider having the tab that’s visible in the navigation be called something more like “Books” and allowing each book that you have to be a subpage that appears when you scroll over the “books” tab (see right). This type of set-up will allow to add even more books in the future with little to no hassle.
Voila! These five steps will take your author website from a one-book site to a multi-book site. You may, of course, have additional updates that you want made. After all, each and every site is different. But these basic changes should ensure that once your newest visitors have arrived, they will be able to see that you are a multi-book author … and most importantly, to learn about (and hopefully buy) your newest book.