So, you want to build an online following using fiction, but most of the successful blogs you find appear to deal in facts, advice and solutions. They tell readers how to repair taps, improve relationships, lose weight or make money while sleeping.
Where does that leave someone who makes things up for a living?
Is there room online for fictional characters, invented murders and people whose marriages are quietly disintegrating?
Yes, there is.
The more accurate answer requires a few extra words about what WordPress can do for a fiction author—and what it cannot do without some assistance from the author.
Why Does a Fiction Author Need a Website?
Social-media platforms are useful, but they are borrowed spaces. Their rules change, their algorithms change, and sometimes their audiences disappear altogether. A writer can spend years building a following only to discover that fewer followers are being shown each new post.
An author’s website is different. It is a permanent home for the work.
It can contain book descriptions, excerpts, photographs, audio, video, personal stories and articles connected to the themes found inside the books. Readers can arrive through Google, WordPress Reader, social media or a link shared by someone else.
More importantly, everything can lead back to the author and their books.
WordPress is one of the most popular ways to create that home. The WordPress software is open-source and free, although a domain name, hosting package or premium features may cost money. A basic site can be built without learning code or wrestling with HTML.
Choose a theme—think of it as wrapping paper for your words—then begin filling the site with content.
WordPress pages can display photographs, movies, audio files, book covers, YouTube videos and numerous other embeds. Most of the complicated work happens behind the scenes. Often, inserting a link is enough for WordPress to recognise the content and display it correctly.
That sounds simple because, at first, it is.
Keeping a website alive for years is where the real work begins.
WordPress.com or a Self-Hosted WordPress Site?
WordPress.com provides hosting and manages much of the site’s technical side. Updates, security and routine maintenance are largely handled for the user, making it attractive to authors who would rather write stories than investigate why a plug-in stopped working at three in the morning.
A free WordPress.com site is enough to begin publishing, although paid plans offer more control and additional features, including plugins.
WordPress.com also has its Reader. Posts can appear there through tags, searches, subscriptions and recommendations. The site’s decorative theme is stripped away inside the Reader, leaving a cleaner version of the post.
That is not necessarily a bad thing.
Pop-ups, counters and other distractions disappear, allowing the words and images to do their jobs. For a fiction writer, that can be an advantage. Readers are presented with the story rather than the furniture surrounding it.
A self-hosted WordPress site gives the author greater control. The site owner chooses the hosting company, manages the domain and can install themes and plug-ins to add almost any feature imaginable.
Useful additions might include:
- Subscription forms
- Online shops
- Photo galleries
- Social-sharing buttons
- Search-engine optimisation tools
- Security and spam protection
- Caching and performance tools
- Tables and design blocks
- Backups
- Advertising systems
Self-hosting does not automatically prevent a site from appearing in the WordPress Reader. A self-hosted site connected through Jetpack can still use parts of the WordPress.com system.
The price of that freedom is responsibility.
Themes, plug-ins and WordPress itself must remain compatible. Many updates can be automated, but the site owner still needs to check that everything works. A neglected plug-in can slow a site, break a page or create a security problem.
No one is standing nearby with a clipboard to remind you. It is your site. You own the freedom and the problems that arrive with it.
What Should a Fiction Author Post?
This is the more difficult question.
Simply creating a website does not create an audience. Publishing a book description and waiting for strangers to find it is roughly equivalent to placing a paperback beneath a shrub and hoping a book club walks past.
A fiction author needs entry points.
Excerpts are one option. They allow readers to sample the voice, characters and atmosphere before committing to a book. The excerpt must still work as online content. Dropping Chapter Seven onto a blank page without context may confuse anyone who has not read Chapters One through Six.
Behind-the-scenes posts can also work. An author might write about the inspiration for a character, the real location behind a fictional scene or the event that produced a particular story.
Writers can discuss research, abandoned plots, deleted scenes and the strange objects they collect for future characters. A photograph, overheard remark or newspaper clipping may sit unused for years before finding its way into a fictional life.
The themes inside a novel can generate another layer of material.
An author who writes historical fiction might discuss the period in which the story is set. A crime writer could examine criminal psychology or investigative mistakes. My own fiction deals with damaged relationships, sexual rejection, manipulation and the darkness people hide behind ordinary domestic lives. Those subjects provide many possible routes into the novels without requiring every post to sound like an advertisement.
That is important.
Readers rarely search Google for an unknown author’s book title. They search for a question, experience, fear or fascination. If an author has written something useful or compelling about that subject, the reader may discover the fiction waiting behind it.
What Has Worked for Me?
Two of the greatest traffic-building posts I experienced as an author began inside the pages of my novels.
I extracted the ideas and rewrote them as independent narratives, presenting them in the style of unusual news events. They looked and felt like stories that might have happened somewhere beyond the edge of the reader’s attention.
People clicked.
Visitor numbers rose sharply, and readers who had never heard of me encountered the type of imagination behind my fiction. The posts worked because they offered a complete package. They did not demand that visitors buy a novel before the experience made sense.
Not every fictional piece will perform that way. In fact, most will not.
Some posts attract attention immediately. Others sit quietly for years before a search engine suddenly decides they answer a question people are asking. A few will never attract more than a handful of readers, no matter how much the author loves them.
That is blogging.
Consistency creates more doors through which readers can enter. Over time, those doors begin connecting. An article leads to an excerpt. The excerpt leads to a character page. The character leads to a novel.
A website becomes less like a noticeboard and more like a body of work.
Can WordPress Sell Books?
WordPress can help promote fiction, but it cannot manufacture interest where none exists.
A website requires time. Posts need titles that make sense to strangers. Pages need internal links. Old information must occasionally be corrected, and weaker material may need rewriting or removal. Search traffic can take months to develop, and even a popular article may produce relatively few book sales.
That does not make the site useless.
A reader may visit several times before becoming curious about the author. Someone who first arrives through a relationship article may later read a dark-fiction excerpt and recognise the same psychological territory. Familiarity develops slowly.
My website now contains years of observations, photographs, experiences and fiction. Some posts connect directly to the SEETHINGS trilogy. Others reveal the writing life that produced it. Together, they show readers what kind of author they have encountered.
That is the real value of WordPress for a fiction writer.
It provides somewhere for all those fragments to gather—and somewhere for readers to find them.
My novels occupy the darkest rooms of that site. They explore intimacy, denial, manipulation and the moment an ordinary person allows something monstrous to speak.
The blog leaves the doors open.
–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay, igniting fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some have escaped.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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