When developing a website to promote your book, you have two primary choices. You can launch a site for the book (booktitle.com) or for you as the author (authorname.com). Between the two, my recommendation is almost always to develop an author website instead of a book site.
If your goal is to brand yourself as an authority in your field, professional speaker or media interview source, it makes sense to focus efforts on developing your personal brand, with your book being an extension of that brand. Maintaining an author site also makes it easier to manage if you intend to write additional books in the future.
Of course you can still have a separate book site if you really want to, and some authors prefer this strategy. However, I personally prefer to focus my efforts on updating and promoting one primary site and driving all of the traffic to that specific site.
There is also a third option that you may not have considered: launch an industry site. This is an approach I took in 2004 with my first book, The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide. I wanted to reach aspiring entrepreneurs and so I launched an industry site (http://BusinessInfoGuide.com) and loaded it with content for that audience. I wrote articles, shared resources, and basically began blogging before I knew what blogging was. The site was live for about nine months before my book came out, which gave me time to build an audience. When I listed the book for pre-sale two months before it was actually in print, it began selling immediately. That was when I really understood the power of using the internet to build an audience.
In case you’re wondering, this also means that you might actually launch two websites. I also maintain a separate author site at http://StephanieChandler.com. My author site is primarily used to attract speaking engagements and media interviews, yet it’s another source for traffic and book sales.
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