AUTHOR WEBSITE DESIGN FOR LITRPG AUTHORS
You built the audience on Royal Road. This is about owning it.
Author website design for serial authors going to print. Built around a launch date rather than a design brief, with an email list you actually own.
Every channel you have belongs to someone else
Royal Road brings the readers. Patreon takes the money. Amazon sells the book. Discord holds the community. All of it works, right up until one of them changes something, and none of it is a list you can write to on the morning your book comes out.
- Royal Road, Patreon and Scribble Hub
- Amazon and Audible
- Discord
- Your publisher’s newsletter
- An email list you own
Your publisher handles retail, distribution and audio, and they are good at it. Building you an audience you control is not their job and never will be. That is the gap I fill.
Three ways to work together
Fixed scope, fixed price, no hourly billing. All prices in USD.
Launch Page
$490
One-off. Live within a week.
- One page on your own domain
- Email signup with an incentive worth subscribing for
- Connected to your email provider and tested
- Domain and hosting set up if you need it
MOST AUTHORS START HERE
Launch Sprint
$1,850
One-off. Delivered before your release date.
- Everything in Launch Page
- A page for each series and each book, with buy links for every format
- Hand-written Book and BookSeries schema
- The signup copy for your Royal Road notes and Patreon posts
- Your launch-day email drafted and scheduled
- Finished and tested before the date, not on it
Ongoing
$95 /month
Optional. Cancel whenever.
- Hosting, backups, updates, security
- A new book page with every release
- Content changes when you need them
- Someone to email when something breaks
If your launch is less than three weeks away I will usually say no rather than rush it. A launch that underperforms because the site went up two days before is no good to either of us.
How it works
- A short call. Fifteen minutes. Your release date, what you have already, and whether any of this is worth doing.
- A fixed quote. Scope and price in writing before anything starts. No hourly billing and no surprises.
- I build it. You send book blurbs, covers and links. I do the rest and show you progress as it goes up.
- Live, with time to spare. Tested and collecting subscribers well before your date, so launch day is just the email going out.
Why me
I read this genre. Not as market research, and I will happily argue about whether a system apocalypse counts as progression fantasy.
I also build websites for a living, at a small agency in Brisbane, and I have spent enough time in Royal Road and Amazon to know why an author page that lists your books in publication order is worse than one that lists them in reading order.
Australia is awkward for calls and fine for everything else. Most of the work is asynchronous anyway, and I would rather send you something finished than sit on a video call about it.
Common questions about author website design
What if I already have a website?
Then we probably do not need to start again. Most of the value sits in the email capture and the book pages, and both can be added to what you already have. I will tell you if a rebuild is genuinely worth it, and usually it is not.
Do I need a publisher first?
No. Some of the authors I work with are still serialising and have not published a book yet. If you have readers and a release coming, that is enough to make this worth doing.
Which email platform do you use?
Whichever one you already pay for. If you have nothing yet, I will usually point you at a free tier that holds a few hundred subscribers, so you can find out whether the list earns its keep before you spend anything on it.
How long does author website design take?
A Launch Page is live inside a week. A Launch Sprint runs two to three weeks, which is why I ask for three weeks of runway before your release date rather than taking the job and rushing it.
If your question is not here, get in touch. There is also more about how I work and the rest of the services I offer.
Got a release date coming?
Fifteen minutes, no pitch. If it is not worth doing I will tell you that.
Or email murray@oceanskydigital.com