An author website is a one-page site for one of your pen names at an address like yourname.booksparker.com, with your books, your bio, signup buttons for your mailing list and your contact details, built from what is already in your account. This article covers creating and publishing it; how to shape each section is in customising your author website.
What you need first
A pen name. Each pen name can have one website, and websites are free on every plan; what a paid plan changes is the small Made with BookSparker note in the footer and the option of a custom domain. New author website on the Author Websites page is greyed out until you have a pen name, and again once every pen name has a site; hover it and it tells you which.
Create your site
Choose your author from the cards; a pen name that already has a site is greyed out and marked as such. The Web address fills itself from the name, lowercased with dashes, and you can change it: lowercase letters, numbers and single dashes, up to 63 characters, and not one of the reserved words such as www, blog or shop. As you type, BookSparker checks whether the address is free and says so in green. Create my website builds the site at once with every book of that pen name, the first of your active mailing lists as its signup list, and the bio, contact email and social links from the pen name's profile, then opens the builder.
Your first visit to the builder
The builder has two panes. On the left, the Content and Settings tabs hold the cards you edit; on the right, Live preview shows the page as it will look, in Desktop or Mobile width, updating as you type. Nothing you change reaches readers until you press Save Changes, and a bar reminds you while there are unsaved changes.
On that first visit a Set up your site checklist sits at the top with five items. Clicking an item opens the matching card and scrolls the preview to it. Feature a book, which is optional, and Set up your buttons and signup tick themselves once a featured book and a mailing list are set, and Publish your site ticks itself when you publish; the other two you tick by hand. The checklist lives in this browser only, you can hide it any time, and it goes away for good once the site is published.
Publish
A new site is a Draft: only you can see it, and its address shows nothing to anyone else. Publish, in the builder header, makes it live and turns the pill green; View site opens it in a new tab, and Unpublish hides it again. Publishing is separate from saving. Press Save Changes first, or the published site will not include what you just changed.
Your address
Your web address, under Settings, is where you change the subdomain later, with the same availability check. Do it with care: the old address stops working the moment you save, there is no forwarding, and anything you shared, from newsletter links to your Amazon author page, points at nothing. A Copy link button under the field gives you the full address to share.
What lives on your site
Your address serves the page itself and, under /privacy, a privacy page BookSparker writes for you, links in the footer and shows in English or German to match the visitor. When you group books by series, each series gets its own page too. Everything else at that address returns a not-found page; the site never mirrors the rest of BookSparker. On the free plan every page carries a Made with BookSparker note in the footer, which paid plans remove.
Subscribers and removing the site
Signups through the site's buttons are listed under Settings with a count and an Export CSV button, and go to your email provider as well when a list is chosen. Delete Website, at the foot of Settings, removes the site, its book selection and those subscribers together; the confirmation offers the CSV download first when there are any, because there is no way back. Deleting frees the address and the pen name, which can then get a new site.
Your sites at a glance
The Author Websites page shows a card per site: a miniature of the live page once published, the address, the Published or Draft pill, lifetime Views and Clicks, the subscriber count and the number of books. Edit opens the builder; Link copies the address, opens it or makes a QR code, and is only available once the site is published.
Common questions
Why is the create button greyed out?
Either you have no pen name yet, or every pen name already has a site. The tooltip on the button says which. Add a pen name under Author Names, or edit the existing site instead.
Can one pen name have two websites?
No. A pen name has one site, and your number of sites is capped by how many pen names your plan allows.
Why does my old address show a not-found page?
You changed the web address. Old addresses are not forwarded, so update every place you shared it, or change the address back.
Where does an edited bio go?
To the pen name. The bio, contact email and social links on the site are the pen name's own, so a change here appears everywhere that profile is shown.