No, authors don't "need" a website. Need it for what? How many readers surf on over to an author's site after they read their book? I don't. No, an author website is a conceit; something for the writer to gaze at lovingly, or perhaps add content to, which no one will read. I do have one, but it costs me nothing, which equates to the benefits I derive from it. Even I rarely pull it up anymore.
I've had a smattering of visitors, my Google Analytics tells me, but I understand who they are ~ either bots or people in foreign lands who stumble upon it by accident. My music blog, which I've had since 2007, has a good number of followers, but when I dug into who these "people" were, most of them weren't people at all.
If I have anything new to share, like a book release, which is basically all I ever have to share, I add it to my site. I have a "News" page, but most of my little snippets are pretty boring ~ the last bit of news I posted was that I was continuing work on Second Chance. Not exactly scintillating. The average engagement time of my visitors is one minute and thirty-nine seconds. So, no, no one is "getting to know me".
Whenever anyone on Reddit asks about author websites and specifically what authors include on theirs, the common response is "short stories" or "essays". Why in the world would I do that? I don't write either of those things; I can't even find time to work on my book. And maybe I'm just an impatient person, but I'm not going to take the time to read some author's short story via their website. One would need to be an ultimate fan to do that. I'm maybe an ultimate fan of one person, a singer, and I still haven't even listened to their newly released album.
Most author sites are generally static, thus limiting the number of repeat visitors. I have a cousin who created a dance website several years back. I stumbled upon it by accident and every once in a while I'll pull it up to see if she's added any new content. She hasn't updated her site in years. Maybe, like me, she has nothing new to say.
After I published my first two novels, I felt I needed a web presence, so I went with Wix because I'd seen it advertised on TV. I paid a monthly fee to maintain my site, even though I hated Wix. It was clunky and really laggy. I could type a new paragraph, go away for ten minutes, and by the time I returned, Wix's software might have finally caught up. And I certainly was deriving no benefit from it, so I canceled my plan and went with a free Blogger site instead. If I'm going to bother with a no-return website, I might as well use software that's free and easy to work with. Sure, my Blogger site has no bells and whistles, but those would only be for me to admire anyway. My latest book doesn't come swooping onto the page; it just sits there. I played around with a couple of site editors, such as GoDaddy, and they were even worse than Wix. Difficult to customize; hardly intuitive.
If you're an author and you think you want a website, be judicious with your money. You don't always get what you pay for. In fact, you never do. It takes a few (easy) steps to transform a Blogger blog into a website, but a few minutes of my time are worth more to me than doling out money for a vanity project.
But hey, maybe you'll have tons of visitors, so a fancy site will be worth it. I'm certainly not a marketing role model.
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