Best website builder for authors

Why we believe Squarespace is the best website builder for authors

After two decades watching author websites do their job or fail at it, one pattern holds up. The authors who sustain a career over ten-plus years run their websites like a compounding asset. New book this year, backlist that keeps selling, email list that grows with each launch. The authors who disappear after one book treat the site as a launch-week billboard. That distinction shapes every opinion below, and it's why Squarespace keeps landing as the pick for working authors.

Where Ghost earns the runner-up spot

Ghost is the runner-up for a specific kind of author, not a second-best-everywhere. If paid newsletters are already the income spine and books are a secondary product, Ghost earns the slot. Outside that, Squarespace is cleaner.

Your paid newsletter is actually the business

Authors who have built a paid newsletter community (on Substack now, moving toward owning the platform) are a real cohort, and Ghost is the natural home. Publishing, email, and subscriptions all live in the same tool, you own the list, and you can migrate your Substack subscribers across without losing them. The author site is secondary infrastructure to the newsletter, not the other way around.

You want the writing and the technical stack clean

Ghost's writing interface is among the best in the industry and strips the platform out of the way when you're drafting. For authors who also publish essays, serialised fiction, or long reader letters between books, this matters more than most builders acknowledge. Squarespace's blog is perfectly functional; Ghost's is pleasant.

Owning the subscriber relationship matters to you philosophically

Substack makes switching expensive by design. Ghost makes switching trivial because you own your data, your domain, and your payment relationships. For authors building long-term independence, Ghost's architecture matches that goal better than any other platform on this list.

The honest case for Ghost stops at the edges. Templates are fewer and less forgiving of weak book covers. Selling direct (signed copies, workshops, speaking) is possible but clumsier than on Squarespace. And the audience that benefits from Ghost is specifically authors whose newsletter is the main engine. For authors whose books are still doing 80 percent of the work, Squarespace is the simpler right answer.

How the other major website builders stack up for authors

Scored 1 to 10 on the factors that matter for a typical working author (two to ten books in catalogue, mix of traditional and/or self-publishing, email list as the primary growth asset).

The author stack: Amazon Author Central, Goodreads, BookFunnel, and your own site

An author's website sits inside a broader ecosystem of platforms that readers actually use to find books. Pretending the site does all the discovery work itself is why most author sites underperform. The website earns its keep by converting readers who arrive from these other channels, not by winning search against Amazon.

Amazon Author Central is free, takes an hour to set up, and is the single most-visited author profile for most working authors. Readers who click on your name in an Amazon book listing land here before they ever see your website. Claim it, fill in the author bio, link your books, enable the Following feature. Your website's job is to catch the Amazon-arrived reader who wants more than a purchase, specifically a mailing list signup or a look at the backlist.

Goodreads remains the default reader-review platform and, despite the interface, is still where committed readers track what they've read and follow authors. A claimed Goodreads author profile with a link back to your site and your mailing list does real work, especially in the launch window of a new book. This is not optional, it's table stakes.

BookFunnel and StoryOrigin are the two most-used tools for delivering free chapters, ARC copies, or bonus content in exchange for email signups. Both integrate cleanly with Squarespace's email capture. The standard flow is: reader finds your book, lands on your site, claims a free prequel or first-three-chapters sampler via BookFunnel, and ends up on your launch-announcement list. Every author I've worked with runs this loop, and the authors who run it for multiple books compound their lists steadily.

Bookshop.org, Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo are the retailer endpoints. Your site should link to every one you have a page on, using a universal link service like Books2Read so you only update one destination when a new retailer launches. Universal links are a small operational win that scales with your backlist and costs nothing extra.

For an independent operator's perspective on running an author business with a website as one component of the stack, Jane Friedman's blog is the canonical reference on the business side of being an author, and The Creative Penn covers self-publishing ops with more depth than any platform blog. Neither is sponsored by any platform, which is the whole point of citing them here.

What authors actually need from a website

Seven features do most of the work. The four "must haves" are the difference between a site that sells books and a site that collects dust between launches. Get these right and the rest is decoration.

Squarespace handles all seven without extra apps. Wix handles five cleanly, with some extra clicks for the newsletter archive and universal link embeds.

Which Squarespace templates suit authors best

Every Squarespace template runs on Fluid Engine and is broadly interchangeable, so the choice is picking the right starting aesthetic rather than a permanent commitment. These four are the ones I point authors toward most often.

Hyde

Magazine-editorial layout with room for serialised or essay content alongside the book catalogue. Best for authors who also publish long-form between books. Reads like a book review magazine rather than a brochure.

Jasper

Editorial grid with a tight sidebar and clear blog structure. Good for authors building a newsletter audience alongside the books, and for anyone who wants the site to feel more "writer" than "product store."

York

Integrated shop layout that treats the backlist as a proper catalogue. Best when direct sales (signed copies, workshops, bundles) are part of the business, not just an afterthought to retailer links.

Bedford

Classic, clean commerce-forward layout. Best when the shop is the centre of gravity, either because you sell direct at volume or because the backlist is large enough to deserve real commerce treatment.

All four handle the checklist above without modification. The template is the starting aesthetic, not the feature set, and I'd gently discourage spending more than a weekend on this choice. Pick whichever reads closest to your books, launch, revise in month three. For a second pair of eyes on matching the template tone to a specific genre, Jane Friedman writes about author branding with more nuance than any platform blog.

Common mistakes authors make picking a builder

Five patterns show up repeatedly. The first is the single most expensive and the one I see most often.

Building the site, delaying the email list. Authors agonise over the website for six months and start the email list the week of the book launch. The list doesn't grow into anything useful by launch day. Every month the list has been live and collecting signups before launch is worth more than every design decision on the site. Start the list before the site is finished. Squarespace lets you run a one-page "coming soon" with email capture in an hour.

Treating the backlist as a dusty archive. A proper backlist page with current cover art, refreshed copy, and active retailer links for every book does more sales work than most authors' new-release hero does. Refresh the backlist every six months. Treat each old book as if you launched it last week.

Over-investing in a blog that stops after launch. Authors often start a launch-week blog of publishing diary entries, stop three months in, and leave a half-dead feed on their homepage for two years. If you're not going to blog consistently for at least a year, don't start. A newsletter archive is a better substitute because it earns its presence by staying updated.

Hiding the buy buttons below the fold. Every book page should have visible retailer buy links above the fold, without scrolling, on mobile. I've watched authors bury them under a long blurb or a cover-reveal hero and wonder why traffic doesn't convert. The reader's intent when they land on a book page is to buy or leave, and the button has to be right there.

Assuming the website replaces Amazon discovery. The site is not the top of the discovery funnel for most authors. Amazon, Goodreads, the podcast you were just on, and the review in a book newsletter are where readers first find you. The site's job is to catch those readers and route them to a purchase, a list signup, or the backlist. Building the site as a standalone discovery engine leads to disappointment and a lot of unused SEO tooling.

Launch windows, holiday sales, and the months that matter

Author sales aren't evenly distributed through the year. October through December carries holiday gifting (a meaningful share of annual nonfiction sales), spring covers the March-to-May publishing window that a lot of traditional pub houses target, and the launch-week spike is concentrated in the first 30 days after a release. Roughly 25 to 40 percent of a book's first-year sales happen in those 30 days for a typical release. The website has to be ready.

Preorder landing page live at least 90 days before launch. A dedicated preorder page, with the cover, retailer links, a blurb, and an email signup, should be up a minimum of three months before release. Preorders count toward first-week sales on Amazon's rankings, which compound into discovery in that critical launch window. Squarespace makes this a half-day job.

Retailer links tested the week before launch. Every retailer link changes or breaks on launch day for some reason, every single time. Amazon ASINs redirect, Bookshop pages go live a day late, Apple Books shows a placeholder until the file propagates. Test each link in private browsing on the Friday before a Tuesday launch. Have a fallback (Books2Read universal link) that still works if a specific retailer isn't live yet.

Newsletter sends queued in advance. Launch-week newsletter sends should be drafted, scheduled, and tested before launch week starts. The announcement send, a day-two send with early reviews, a week-one send to lapsed subscribers. Launch-week you is too busy to write newsletters from scratch.

Review-request follow-up automation. Every reader who buys a book via your site, signs up for your list, or downloads a free sampler is a potential review source. An automated 14-day follow-up asking for an Amazon or Goodreads review converts meaningfully and compounds across the book's life. Set it up once per book, forget it.

What I'm less sure about. Honestly? I'm uncertain how much AI-generated book-description copy is worth using. Authors are starting to draft retailer descriptions, back-cover blurbs, and landing-page copy with AI assistance, and sometimes it reads fine. Other times it quietly erodes the voice that makes readers pick a particular author over the algorithm's current favourite. My current bet is to draft your own book descriptions and let AI help only with the universal copy (author bio boilerplate, retailer meta) where voice matters less. This call may change as AI writing gets better at genre register.

Get the site live before the next launch

Two things matter more than which builder you choose this afternoon. First, the site has to be live with the email opt-in running at least 90 days before your next book is on sale. Second, the backlist page has to treat every past book like it launched last week. Squarespace's 14-day free trial is enough for a focused author to put up a credible site with a book page, backlist, launch landing page, and working mailing-list capture in a weekend. Pick one, launch, and get back to writing the next book.

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Or start with Ghost if a paid newsletter is the actual income engine and the book sales are a secondary channel.