Should you create a separate website for your book? Books? Series of books?

Quick answer (with another question): Are you up for maintaining it?

The screenshot for this post doesn’t bring pain to my heart because I didn’t invest more than maybe an hour into it. But if you invest time and energy and money into something and then don’t maintain it and have to let it die a quiet death then it’s more painful.

Exactly 2 years ago, I set up a domain for my children’s book series. I had lofty goals to create a following and post content about the books, the characters, and anything related to the books. After an initial set up phase, I did exactly nothing for two years. It would’ve only been one year but that “dot-land” domain name cost me even more and had a two-year minimum if I remember correctly. In fact, that’s probably the most painful part was getting that domain name that I quite liked and letting it go today.

I don’t even have a screenshot of the landing page I created during that first hour as now it’s gone into the oblivion of the Internet black hole. All I have is the death warrant which I just signed to make the website completely vanish.

This is all a long, drawn-out way of saying I shouldn’t have set up a new domain for this series of books. If you want my now much more educated strategy of today, I would only create a new domain and a new website when I knew, from experience, that I needed a separate domain other than my author website to create a new home for a book or a series.

If you like to see an example of an author who’s doing it right with the website for a series, have a look at “The Four Worlds Series” by Angela J. Ford. She maintains that series site, as well as her own author site and she, does a great job of both. I happen to know that she’s very savvy in WordPress development and design so it’s easy for her to maintain.

It comes down to that, really: are you willing and able to update the website of your book?

Bye bye Li & Lu website. I’m glad it wasn’t a painful death. In fact, I bet you barely even felt the slight pinprick administering the death blow.