You’ve written a manuscript. Now, you’re at a crossroads. Do you tuck it away in a drawer, content that you’ve finished something you’ve always wanted to do? Do you publish it to say you’ve published something, but don’t really plan to do more with it? Or are you like many of us, and you want to continue the momentum, to keep writing and publishing?

Some authors have a day job they consider their career, and writing is just something they do for fun. If that’s you, it’s a perfectly valid option. You may not care as much about building a brand and list, or about creating a platform. Some are just getting started and looking for a blueprint on the next steps to do. Others have already started publishing, but didn’t know what else to work on, so they haven’t started working on the things to take writing from a hobby to a business. If you’re in one of those last two groups, this article is for you.

Claim Your Name

The first thing you should do to start building your professional author platform is buy your domain name. Why is this important? Think about all of the sites you visit. You don’t visit Walmart with a Shopify domain in front of it. You don’t see Steven King on a Wix site. New York Times isn’t on Weebly. These sites are fine for getting started, or if you just want a place to host links to your work for posterity to have everything in one place.

If you’re intending on a writing career, though, you want a reliable brand. You want something recognizable. The longer your website address is, the harder it will be to remember. Whether you’re using a pen name or your legal name, purchasing a domain lends legitimacy and allows you to take the next steps, as everything beyond this starts with your home on the web.

I suggest using Cloudflare. Not only is it one of the cheapest places around for domain names, but you can manage everything else you need to do straight from their dashboard. They are also privacy-focused, so when someone tries to look up who owns the domain, they will find Cloudflare’s information, not yours.

Simply sign up for an account with Cloudflare. Once you enter your main portal, on the left hand side, click Domains- Registration- Buy Domain. It will show you what’s available, and the prices. Choose your domain, or look up something else if the one you want isn’t available. Add in the required information, and purchase. That’s it! You own your own domain!

Upgrade Your Email

Now, you can do something with it. Nearly all spam emails authors are getting right now are from free emails, mostly Gmail. If you’re still using Gmail, Hotmail, and the like as your author email, you’re not setting yourself up for success. People are seeing anything from these emails as potential spam, and they’re deleting them, or worse, reporting them.

Again- Steven King isn’t sending anyone emails from a Gmail account. The New York Times isn’t contacting anyone from an old Yahoo email. They have invested in their business with professional dot com emails, because it sets a standard. As indies, we should be part of the standard, too.

I personally use Zoho Mail. It’s free, allows you to set up your own domain, and has a lot of features you can customize to make it your own. You do have to set up some items such as MX, SPF, and DKIM records, BUT… Zoho walks you through exactly what to add and where. If you’ve chosen Cloudflare as your registrar in step 1, you add everything straight in there in the DNS section, exactly how Zoho tells you to do it. Both sites make it very easy and straightforward.

Build Your Platform

You now have a domain and an author email set up. It’s time to build your website. This is your official ‘face’ on the web. It’s the address you’ll put on business cards, potential event signage, and your social media pages. It’s where you’ll direct readers to find your books, sign up to your newsletter, and to contact you. In other words, it’s your home on the web, and everything else revolves around it or directs to it.

There are free hosting options available. There are cheap hosting options available. Nearly all hosts and sites have website builders. Some are proprietary and linked to the host itself, like Weebly and Wix. Others like Divi and Elementor are made for WordPress but can be used on any host.

InfinityFree is one free option that lets you upgrade to paid if you decide you need more robust services later. Freehostia and FreeHosting are two other options. Cheap shared hosting services are quite literally a dime a dozen. Now, the cheapest will require at least a year’s payment upfront or longer. Do pay attention to what the cost will be after that introductory period is up. If you’re like me and prefer to start with a month-to-month plan, some options are available as well. Hostinger, InterServer, Hosting.com, and CazaraTech all offer some form of monthly pricing.

I’ve used InterServer and CazaraTech for WordPress hosting in the past, but outgrew them as I began hosting multiple sites/businesses on my servers, so I now run my own. Obviously, that’s not in a normal indie’s repertoire, so you won’t need to think about that! For those interested, I currently run a dedicated server with KnownHost that handles my websites and newsletter, and a storage server through Hetzner for my custom Dropbox alternative.

Once you have your hosting, you can connect your domain and email. Nearly all of the hosting options will be managed, so they will help get you set up. You can use the provider’s website builders for your site. You can use Elementor or Divi if you’re using WordPress. You can pay someone on Fiverr or elsewhere to build it. Either way… don’t go too crazy with tons of colors, textures, themes. Simple is best, and chaotic backgrounds are exhausting. You want people to be able to easily find what they need on your site, not get run off by bad design.

I personally use WordPress and Elementor to build my sites. Elementor is a drag-and-drop builder that’s a free plugin. You simply install it using the Plugins page in WordPress, and drag and drop the elements you want to add to the page. There are so many websites and blogs that offer help and tutorials for building websites, especially for WordPress, so I don’t want to go too in-depth here.

Suffice to say, for ease of use and future scalability, I will always recommend building your site on WordPress. There are plugins for anything you can possibly imagine. Builders galore. Your site can be transferred to nearly any other host in the future with minimal fuss. Most developers can work with it, and templates are available everywhere to theme your site without you needing to code a thing. It has a very large and active community behind it, which means it is consistently being worked on and improved.

A small note about AI- If you choose to use one of the proprietary builders locked to a certain host, such as Weebly, Wix, SiteGround, etc… I do suggest not using the AI features to build your site. Those builders and their AI features are locked to the site and their hosting. That means, if you ever decide to move hosts, those builders don’t go with you.

Your entire site will be broken and not salvageable when moved to a new host. The content itself will be there, but any templates, layouts, and designing you did will be removed and what’s left will be a managed mess. I’ve had to rebuild my sites from scratch when I left Weebly for WordPress, and it was a giant headache. To that end, I now avoid anything proprietary because I can’t future-proof it.

With that said, Elementor, Divi, and other plugin type builders do have their own AI tools if you’d like to use them and those are contained within the plugins. That way, if you ever move hosts, installing the plugins on your new host will keep your website intact.

Start Your List

This will be expanded on in my next article as it’s that big of a section. However, for now, I’ll just say… yes, you need a newsletter. No, it’s not optional. No, you don’t have to send every day/week/month. No, you don’t have to fill it with things you don’t want to fill it with. But yes, you do need one. I’ll tell you why and how to grow it later, but for now, let’s focus on companies and caveats.

First, most companies give you a small free tier to try, but as you grow, they get very expensive. When looking at providers, always check their pricing for higher numbers of subscribers, even if you don’t think you will ever need them. You don’t want to start on a super expensive platform, only to realize you need to move before you’re ready because they’re too expensive and you’ve hit the limit early.

Second, the CAN-SPAM act requires a physical mailing address at the bottom of every email. Neglecting this can earn you a fine for every single email sent without it. This is non-negotiable… but flexible. See, they just need a physical mailing address you can be reached at, but it doesn’t need to be one you can be reached immediately at. It doesn’t need to be a residence, either.

Some authors rent a PO Box in their town or the next town over if it’s cheaper. Others ask their office or workplace if they can use that address, since they’ll likely never get actual mail there. Kit, formerly ConvertKit, allows you to use their office location as an address, but I do believe they’re the only one that does that.

Other authors use virtual mailboxes or package forwarding addresses. Places like ViaBox are good because you get a mailbox address, but you only pay if they actually process a piece of mail for you there. Since they probably never will, it ends up being free for you.

Some options to check for newsletter services- MailerLite, MailChimp, Mailjet, ActiveCampaign, EmailOctopus, Sequenzy, GetResponse, Brevo, MooSend, Sender, Sendfox.

Are all of those still too expensive when you look at higher subscriber numbers? Are you a little bit techy, or willing to pay a little extra to have setup done for you? Check out Sendy. It’s a self-hosted newsletter service. You buy a cheap $5 server. (Mine’s on KnownHost) Then, you buy Sendy for $69, and hook it to an Amazon SES account. Emails through Amazon SES cost me less than $1 a month.

There are no limits on subscribers. I can send up to 50k emails a day if I want to. I can have multiple newsletters on one account. No one is slapping my hands for unsubscribes. I get the same reports and campaign tracking that the other services have, only… I run my own newsletter and own my own list.

Don’t feel comfortable setting things up yourself? The team at Sendy will set it up for you with their installation service. If you’re slightly tech-savvy and willing to learn a new program, I highly recommend this route straight from the get-go. You won’t ever have to be afraid of outgrowing your ‘free’ tier elsewhere, and will be free to simply build your list with as much enthusiasm as you can.

Join Reader Spaces

Most authors neglect this part, and it’s a big part of things. A lot of readers can’t review on Amazon. Either they haven’t spent the $50 Amazon requires for reviewing privileges, they’ve had their reviewing locked for an arbitrary reason, or they don’t use Amazon… it doesn’t matter the reason, you’re going to find some people that can’t leave reviews on Amazon. Still, reviews are really important as an indie author.

There are two important places you should join and have an author profile, regardless of where you’re planning to sell your books besides updating your author profile on Amazon. The first is Goodreads. Authors can add your books to their shelves, rate and review it there, and share it with their friends. As an author, do remember this isn’t your space, it’s for readers. Still, you need to claim your author dashboard there in order to add your books so they can find them. Since Goodreads doesn’t require special privileges to review, many more readers are likely to review on GR than on Amazon.

Second, is BookBub. Most authors neglect this one, and it’s mindboggling. Did you know BookBub offers free marketing for you? Sure, the featured deals are expensive and not guaranteed, but just having an account on there offers you two separate ways to reach your followers, one of which is absolutely free to you.

First, New Release Alerts. BookBub automatically emails all your followers as long as you add your eligible book to your BookBub profile within seven days of release. This is FREE marketing for you. You don’t pay for it, you don’t schedule it, nothing. You simply add your new release to your BookBub dashboard, and they send an alert out to everyone who follows you.

Second, Preorder Alerts. When you have people following you, they can separately sign up for preorder alerts from their favorite authors. If you have a preorder up on Amazon, you can add the preorder to your BookBub dashboard. At that time, it will ask you if you’d like to send a preorder alert to your eligible followers, as long as you have at least 1,000 followers.

It costs $0.02 per follower, but not all of your followers will have opted in for preorder alerts, so your cost will not be equal to the total amount of followers you have. For instance, I just crossed 1,000 followers. For my latest, I was offered this deal. I ended up paying a little over $6.20, since only around 300 of my followers had opted in for alerts. This is some of the cheapest marketing around! Readers can also leave reviews on BookBub, and they’re not associated with Amazon, so that’s another plus for some reviewers.

Branch Out

Now, it’s time to decide where you’ll be spending most of your time. Social media fads come and go. There was MySpace and Tumblr, then Twitter and Facebook. After that came TikTok and Threads. An author cannot be expected to keep up on all social medias at once, while still updating their website and writing. It’s impossible. For now, I suggest researching your genre and picking 2-3 social media sites that other authors in your genre seem to be doing well on.

I’m finding some organic traction on Threads, and I do still get interaction on Facebook. I haven’t investigated TikTok much as I’m not great at videos, but I know BookTok is a huge phenomenon. Depending on what you write, you may find Instagram or Twitter have better reach.

My suggestion? Claim your name on all of them, keeping your username the same if you can, or as close to the same as possible. Then, try them out. Build your profile, add the links to a LinkTree or buttons on your website, and switch which one you use monthly. See which one suits you, which is easiest to you. Find out where your niche readers are.

For everything else, there are tools and apps designed to help you post everywhere without actually being there. I’ll share some of those tips and tricks in a later article with helpful software and tools for authors. For now, simply claiming your name and trying them out is the goal.

Now what?

If you’ve followed everything in this article, congratulations! You now have a professional author presence on the web. You have a domain leading to a website, a newsletter to collect reader emails. You have an email with authority, so people know it’s actually you emailing them. You’ve started your author profiles on Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. You’ve created profiles on the popular social media sites, not only to ensure your name isn’t taken by someone else, but to reach your readers where they’re spending the most time.

In the next article, we’ll talk about what to do with all of these things, and how to best use them to your advantage. Until then, have fun exploring the features of your new website and playing with the design of everything you’ve built. Trust me… that part is ongoing and there’s always something we’ll find ourselves tweaking and messing with!