I'm honestly debating on how important a book related site is vs a writers site.

I see a Writer's Dedicated site as a good location for the writer to create an endless amount of fiction and highlight the works they are attempting to publish commercially.

Obviously a site dedicated to a book or series there of, would be very targeted and specific on the content.

What do you think?

I think a platform is very important. There's tonnes of evidence that it causes agents to reject you if you don't have one. Here's a topic on http://www.creativeburrow.org/index.php?topic=1718.0 which has multiple good stories dropped because of no platform.

I would really hope every author has an author site where they advertise all of their books in a central place....but I would NEVER trade it off for a bunch of book sites. For starters, if you havent published it, it's going to be hard to get viewers, and with no central place to find your books people wont know where to find info on you. Not to mention it's a waste of space when you could buy one domain and hosting per year instead of multiple domains which add up quick.

You can have fan areas for each book/series on your site if you want, either a forum type thing for each one or one forum with categories/sections for each book. I'd prefer the later, but it depends on your fans I guess.

If you look at the way movie studios do it they have websites for each movie. I don't think that's worth it, but I havent looked at stats or anything. It's probably worth it for maybe for 6-12 months while there's hype, if you make it redirect to a page/section on the studio's main site when the hype is gone, but otherwise it's pointless IMO.

So I think if you want a book site you would need to buy the domain for a year, and after 6 months I'd redirect it to your author site unless there's hype (and potentially stop redirects if there's a renewal in hype and you want to). Regardless, you should ALWAYS have a prominent link back to the author site on every page. But you should ALWAYS have an author site, and you should have and build that first!


Hope that answers the question or helps any, I have a splitting headache and most of it is opinion so I could be wrong, I'll research later if I get time .

I would think that a site that acts as a hub with pages dedicated to each series or book would be best. It gives space to highlight each series, without creating a complex and hard to follow range of different sites.

That was sort of what I was trying to get at as well. As someone who owns almost 7 addon domains and has worked across many sites.....it would be PAINFUL for an admin and confusing for users at best.....not to mention it's SERIOUSLY hard to find available domain names....so one would be called something like horrorstory.com and the next would be scarystorythebook.com unless you thought ahead and did something like author_hottorstory.com and author_scarystory.com you know? But don't use underscores or dashes in your urls .

I have found that Xarrok.com is a great resource URL for my readers. I have it designed as a website, w/ a blog and sections w/ previews and details from the stories.

I have recently utilized the site for a blog hop but if you search for Xarrok anywhere my site comes up first I'm still in the top 3 pages for scifi and science fiction but not consistently. I've got a lot of SEO to work on once I've got the content finished (which might be a few eons) LOL

That's a good idea definitely, and having your fans in a central place makes it look like you have more than if they were spread out in little groups for each book lol.

I want to eventually draw my readers into a group interaction/forum at some point. we shall see how that goes.

Maybe start off with some weekend chat sessions or something?

You could even do voice chat, there's heaps of free stuff for that, one notable one is Mumble.

If you're at the early to mid stages of your career, a writer's website is enough. You need a platform.

But if your current project has a completely different audience than your regular writing, sure you might consider a project specific website.