My author websites were named after books, which sounds harmless, and meant that eighteen months of publishing built nothing I could carry forward.
One was thelightningwar.pl, the other silentrepublic.pl, and both were built the way a writer builds things. I finished a series, wanted a home for it, and registered a domain with the series name on it. Then I did it again. Every new series would have needed a third site, a fourth, a fifth, each one starting from zero authority and zero traffic.
Readers don’t work that way. A reader who finishes book three of The Lightning War and wants more doesn’t search for a series title she half-remembers, she searches for the author name, and until last week, if she searched mine, she found nothing I owned.
So I spent an evening rebuilding from scratch, and both sites, milesphoenixbooks.com and alexradec.com, are live now. Before writing a line of HTML I ran the research properly: a survey of what military SF and post-apocalyptic author sites actually do, plus conversion and technical benchmarks for indie sites in 2026. Some of it confirmed what I assumed, a larger portion contradicted me, and one finding cost me a design I’d been fond of for two years.
The number that made this urgent
In May 2025 my books earned $5,065, and Amazon Attribution says my Meta ads drove $52 of that.
I’d been running paid ads as though they were the engine, when they were a rounding error. Whatever sold those books was happening somewhere I couldn’t see and couldn’t control, which is a polite way of saying it happened inside Amazon’s algorithm. When intake collapsed, and my revenue fell from $5,182 in April 2025 to $565 in July 2026, down 84%, I had no channel of my own to compensate with: no traffic, and no way to reach past readers except two mailing lists sitting on 408 and 390 subscribers, both of which I’d treated as an afterthought.
The Written Word Media 2025 survey of 1,346 indie authors found that the cleanest predictor of monthly income isn’t catalog size or ad spend, but email list size. Authors earning above $10,000 a month average over 18,000 subscribers. I have under 800 across two pen names, eighteen months after my first novel went up
That, and not aesthetics, is the whole argument for rebuilding. My old sites looked fine, they just weren’t doing the one job a website does that Amazon will never do for me, which is to turn a stranger into someone whose email address I own.
If you take nothing else from this, take the ordering: your website’s job is not to sell books, because Amazon closes better than you will. Its job is to capture the reader before Amazon gets her, so that when your rank drops, or a category shifts, or a new book lands in a dead week, you still have a way to speak to the people who already like your work.
