The Importance of Having Your Own Domain Name
Another #MarketingForAuthors article!
The digital landscape is ever-shifting. When giants like Twitter can fall in the span of months after standing tall for over a decade as a mainstay of the internet, you can be certain that the only thing that is certain on the internet is change.
And this means changing all of your links. You’ve deleted your Twitter and Instragram, now happily ensconced on BlueSky and Mastodon, you’ve left Goodreads behind and can now be found on StoryGraph, you’ve deleted your Substack and now set up shop on Ghost.io! Your newsletter is now hosted on Buttondown after some steep price hikes at Mailchimp. Amazing! But…
You released that book in 2019 and it’s been sitting on someone’s shelf since then, waiting for that reader to make their way through the other 600 books ahead of yours on their to-be-read list. And finally, in March of The Year of Our Luigi 2025, they pick it up. With a fervency yet unseen in any reader, they devour it completely. They are obsessed. You are their new favorite author. They get to the last page, where you lovingly laid out all of your links complete with little social media icons. They type in your Twitter address, knowing that it’s now ‘X’ and making the URL substitution for you. But the account is gone. They try your instagram address. Vanished. Substack? Gone as if it never existed. Ok! But your newsletter MUST still be there! But the mailchimp address they type in brings up a 404. Your page is still there on Goodreads, at least. But it hasn’t had any updates since 2021…
Where, oh new favorite author, are you? They wonder. How will they get all the bonus content you promised them would be on you Substack? And you mentioned exclusive cover reveals on your insta but it’s gone! And how can they join your ARC team if they can’t even find your newsletter? All of those links you provided so you could stay connected and they are all dead, shiveled on the dying vine of tech companies abandoning their core users in favor of ads!
But what if those links didn’t have to die? What if you could do something so that those links in the back of your book were as fresh as a flower in the spring?
(These overly wrought pollen-laced metaphors brought to you by Cetirizine.)
No, this—unfortunately—does not involve seizing silicon valley for the people and nationalizing the tech industry to serve and benefit the people. This involves owning your own domain name.
Yes, this is another “expense” line in your indie author budget. Domain name prices vary, with ‘dot com’ being around $25 USD per year, and more niche top level domains like ‘dot ink’ being around $60 USD per year. A lot of domain registrars will have sales where some top level domains (TLDs) are discounted to something like $2.99 for the first year and $14 to renew every year after that. Not the largest expense when you consider that many services charge $20 per month for something. But it’s not insignificant if you are still operating in the black with your indie author business.
But that expense could save you hundreds of hours of labor on your part and save your readers endless frustration.
The reader discussed at the start has already spent money on your books once, and is likely to spend more money on you in the future. I would go so far as to say they actively want to find more ways to give you money! They wanna know when your next book comes out! They are looking for your Substack and might be inclined to pay you monthly for it! They are hoping to get that free novella you promised them if they join your newsletter! They are ready to be a member of your fan club.
What if, instead of seeing `twitter.com/authorname`in the back of your book, they saw `socialmedia.authorname.com`? What if instead of seeing `authorname.substack.com` they saw `extras.authorname.com`? What if instead of seeing `authorname.mailchimp.com` they saw `newsletter.authorname.com`?
When you own your own domain name, you can set up subdomains and use “forwards” or “redirects” to point those subdomains somewhere else. You don’t have to create a landing page that then has a button or anything so complicated. Just need to go into your registrar and do some tinkering. Some very simple tinkering, I promise.
Here is what the dashboard for my domain registrar for my main author website looks like if you check my “Forwards.” I have several subdomains set up and pointing to other websites. I use Hover as my registar and DNS service for daxmurray.com
The process of adding a redirect/forward in my DNS registrar is pretty straight forward. Select the forward type (I usually go with subdomain forwards) and then paste in the address you want it to point to! While this is the process in Hover, it isn’t that different in other services!
Once you have your forwards set up, you can change them at any time. Instead of going into the backmatter of all your books and removing the twitter link and adding your BlueSky Link, and then uploading the new versions of your books to IngramSpark and paying the revision fee or waiting for it to get approved on Draft2Digital, etc, you just have to log into your domain registrar and change the forwarding location.
Yesterday, `socialmedia.authorname.com` pointed to Twitter. Today, it points to Mastodon! Yesterday `newsletter.authorname.com` pointed to a mailchimp landing page! Today it points to a buttondown landing page!
But, there are other ways to do this to if you don’t like tinkering in your domain registrar. Both BookFunnel and StoryOrigin let you create custom links using subdirectories rather than subdomain. Subdomains come before your base URL, and subdirectories come after.
I use both BookFunnel and StoryOrigin and have them set up with their own subdomains. They kinda service different but similar purposes, but both easily allow you to create custom links via subdirectories based on your own subdomain.
I use BookFunnel’s custom links to brand my BookFunnel landing pages. I use StoryOrigin to basically do everything else.
After I set up my BookFunnel to use `books.daxmurray.com` as the domain, I could go into the domain manager in bookfunnel and create human-readable links for all of the links bookfunnel provides for their landing pages. Even if I change out landing pages later or update them, the link stays the same, so my promo graphics and links for “Also By…” list in my backmatter are always exactly what I want them to be, without having to update the link address itself.
You don’t have to use a subdomain with BookFunnel, you can create your subdirectories on your base URL if you want! But this is what it looks like either way. Add in what you want to come after the slash, and then where you want it to point!
StoryOrigin has a very similar set up! I use it for basically everything else, including, as shown here, the links to the BookFunnel sample pages. It makes sense in my head, I swear, since I use `read` subdomain on StoryOrigin!
You can create several types of custom links on StoryOrigin, and if you have it set up to have reader magnets, universal book links, and direct sales pages, you can create the custom links pointing to those, too!
StoryOrigin also has a very simple interface for creating custom links based on your own domain name. Enter the ‘path’ (subdirectory) and the destination! Voila!
Having your own domain allows you to keep a consistent brand across your web presence and update where the links are pointing to quicker than a billionaire can buy and ruin your favorite social media website.
This means that the links in the back of your books are always going to be up to date without you spending hours updating each one in the epub, mobi, and pdf and then uploading it to every retailer and storefront in which you have your book available. Readers will always be able to find you even if they bought your book 8 years ago and the entire internet landscape has changed since then.
A most recent example for me, personally, is when I changed the sign ups for QueerBooksWeekly from Calendly to TidyCal. Calendly was $12 per month and I found a special deal for TidyCal for a one-time payment of $40 and jumped on it like a bee to a flower. Plus, it had a lot more robust feature set. Luckily, I had set up booking.queerbooksweekly already. It was pointing to Calendly, but I just had to go in and swap that to TidyCal. I didn’t need to swap out my pinned post on QBW, didn’t need to go through and let all the people in all the discord servers I’m in know that the link was now TidyCal. I just swapped on the backend.
Voilá! I hope this article was helpful for you and that you are able to leverage your own URL to stake out your claim on the web, rather than being at the whims of billionaires suddenly making your favorite website into a one-letter mistake.
If this, or any of my other Marketing for Authors posts helped you out, consider buying some of my queer fantasy books or leaving me a tip! Thank you!