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.
Editorial templates that frame the book
Squarespace's typography and whitespace conventions are the right ones for a book-focused site. Hyde, Jasper, York, and Bedford all centre the cover art, give the back-cover-copy room to breathe, and don't crowd the page with the lead-magnet widgets that plague most "author theme" WordPress setups. Wix's author-labelled templates are mixed and most still look like 2015. Shopify is built for inventory-heavy stores and feels wrong around a five-book catalogue. Webflow looks gorgeous with a designer and cluttered without one.
Launch landing pages that convert cleanly
A book launch needs a dedicated landing page with the cover, the buy links (Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, Kobo, Apple), a blurb, an excerpt option, and email capture. Squarespace templates handle this natively, and you can spin a new one up in an afternoon for each release. Wix handles it too, with more clicks. Shopify will pull you toward treating the book as a product SKU, which works for self-direct-sales but stops you from linking to retailer pages cleanly. Webflow will do whatever you build, which is the double-edge of Webflow.
The backlist page does more heavy lifting than the new-release hero
Here's the claim I watch authors resist for the first five books and accept by the tenth. Over a ten-year career, the cumulative sales of your backlist (books released in years 1 through 8) will outsell the book you release this year by a wide margin. A reader arrives via the new book and then buys two or three earlier ones over the next month. That means the backlist page is doing more sales work than the front-page hero. Authors under-invest in it, treating it as an archive rather than a storefront. The operators who treat the backlist page as their single most important page, with proper cover art, fresh back-cover copy, buy links per retailer, and quoted reviews per book, compound their catalogue income year over year in a way that launch campaigns alone never produce.
Email capture wired to the same dashboard
An author's email list is the single most reliable predictor of next-launch sales. Squarespace Email Campaigns lives in the same dashboard as your pages, so the opt-in on your home page, the lead magnet behind a first-chapter download, and the automated follow-up sequence all share one customer record. Wix has a similar setup, slightly more fragmented. Shopify needs Klaviyo or an equivalent paid service. Ghost does this beautifully if newsletters are genuinely the business. For most authors, Squarespace is the tighter single-tool answer.
Amazon Author Central is doing more than you think
A practical aside that most comparisons leave out. Your Amazon Author Central page (free, set up in an hour) is where a large share of your book discovery actually happens. Book buyers land there before they ever click through to your website. The site's job is to catch the reader who has already decided to follow you, not to be the first point of discovery. That framing changes what matters on the site: email capture, backlist links, event pages, and a clear "what's next" for the reader, not endless SEO blog content.
Predictable pricing on thin-margin economics
Author economics are tight. A royalty on a $15 paperback can be $1.50 to $3.00 depending on the publishing setup, and a lot of first-year authors are still earning back a modest advance. Squarespace's commerce tiers include payment processing without a platform fee, which matters if you're selling direct (signed copies, collector editions). Current pricing is on the CTA, because it moves, and there's no point quoting numbers here that go stale in three months.
The right pick for most working authors
Scoring all four against the real working rhythm of an author's career, the best website builder for authors is Squarespace. Editorial templates, clean launch landing pages, backlist galleries that do actual sales work, and email capture in one dashboard. Ghost is the better call if your paid newsletter is the income engine and the books sit alongside it rather than drive it. Skip Shopify unless you're selling direct at serious volume (signed editions, special runs). Skip Webflow unless a designer is part of the project and the site is part of a brand launch, not an author launch.
Try Squarespace freeHow the 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).
| Factor | Squarespace | Wix | Shopify | Webflow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial template quality | 9 | 6 | 5 | 8if designer |
| Launch landing pages | 9 | 7 | 6SKU-first | 8 |
| Backlist / catalogue display | 9 | 7 | 8 | 7 |
| Email capture in-dashboard | 9 | 7 | 5needs Klaviyo | 6 |
| Retailer buy-link integration | 9 | 8 | 6 | 8 |
| Blog & long-form | 8 | 7 | 5 | 7 |
| Ease of setup | 9 | 9 | 7 | 4 |
| Transaction fees | 9none on Commerce | 7 | 9 | 7 |
| Relative cost tier | Mid | Mid | Premium | Premium |
| Overall fit for authors | 8.8 🏆 | 7.1 | 6.3 | 6.9 |
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.
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.