How to Build a Great Author Website

Today, I came across an excellent blog entry written by Thad McIlroy.

Thad is a veteran in the publishing industry and lists 15 points that a good author website must have in order to engage the reader. While you can read through the points on the original blog entry, I wanted to give some additional (and complimentary thoughts) related to the entry.

1. Magic Content - Thad calls these backgrounders, audio-podcasts, videos from YouTube, discussion points. etc. It's vital to engage readers and offer them valuable insight, information, inspiration or entertainment without asking for anything in return. I've seen too many authors hold back on information in the hope that it's too valuable. A better strategy would be to give away as much content as possible for free so as to gain mind-share. Obscurity is the enemy of the fledgling author and free magic content is one weapon to overcome this enemy.

2. Share-ability - This is Thad's 15th point. Allowing your reader to share your work with their friends and contacts is crucial. Done right, this can help your book go viral. At the very least, portions of your website (articles, videos, blog entries, book-excerpts) should be share-able on all of the major social networking sites and book-marking sites (Facebook, Twitter etc.) And readers must be able to share information with just one click.

The BookBuzzr widget is like a portable author website. It contains plenty of magic content (the book-excerpt) and allows users to share information with just one click. Check out the sample widget below.