This used to be a major section of my site. But when I switched my focus to cater to formatting books for authors, I took a lot of the content aimed at promoting my web development services down.
At present, I offer website creation services on an extremely limited basis to clients who have also purchased eBook (Kindle or ePub) or print-on-demand book formatting services.
Why is a website important for authors?
For some authors, it isn’t! Don’t feel you absolutely have to have a website. But if you’d like to be able to communicate with your readers, or offer books through different vendors (e.g. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iTunes bookstore, Smashwords, etc.), it’s probably a good idea to have at least a simple site. This is especially true if you have, or plan to have, multiple books. Non-Amazon vendors generally don’t allow you to mention or link to Amazon in your bio description—but you can link to your own website, which will allow you to direct visitors to all of your sales channels.
What does it cost and what is included?
If you are an author in need of a basic site to provide you with a web presence, I offer simple WordPress sites at reasonable rates—starting at $350 for extremely simple sites. . These sites may or may not include a blog—that’s up to you. I generally recommend including a blog only when you are sure that you’ll be updating it on a regular basis. As you can see from my own blog, it starts to look silly when the last update was years ago! 🙂