An author site takes no payments. It sends people to retailers and collects email addresses, which makes redirects and a list the entire technical surface.
Everything an author site does is either point somebody at a retailer or persuade them to join a list.
Retailer URLs change, editions go out of print and territories differ. Those links are managed redirects rather than hard-coded, so fixing one is one change instead of forty.
Cover reveals and preorder pages go live at a contracted time, often set by a publisher. Scheduled publishing runs on a real timer rather than on the next page view.
It is the only audience an author owns outright, independent of any platform. Signup handling and export are treated as the important part of the site, because they are.
A review, a podcast or a prize listing sends a year of traffic in two days. Pages are served from the edge so the spike is bandwidth rather than an outage.
Older titles keep selling quietly for years. Their pages and links are maintained rather than left to rot behind the current release.
Publication dates are contractual. The site has to be correct at a specific hour, with links that work in every territory, and nobody technical is on hand that morning.
The site is judged on two days a year. Both are known in advance, which makes them the only ones worth engineering for.
No checkout, no inventory. What is left is outbound links, a list and a date, so those are what get the attention.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Retailer links | Managed as central redirects rather than hard-coded | Retailer URLs change and editions differ by territory, so a link written into forty pages becomes forty edits the moment one breaks. |
| Timed publishing | Driven by a real scheduler rather than by page views | A cover reveal or preorder page has a contracted go-live hour, and WordPress's own scheduler only fires when somebody happens to visit. |
| Mailing list handling | Signup and export treated as the site's primary function | The list is the only audience an author owns independently of a retailer or platform, which makes it more valuable than anything else on the site. |
| Spike delivery | Book and news pages served from the edge | A review or prize listing delivers a year of traffic across two days, and it arrives without warning on a page you cannot rewrite in time. |
| Back catalogue upkeep | Older title pages kept current rather than archived | Previous books keep selling quietly, and their pages are where broken retailer links go unnoticed for years. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the author site across — migration is free, list included.