Not long ago a reader told me she’d found one of my authors by asking an AI assistant what to read next. She had the author’s name and nothing else, so she did what readers do: she landed on the website, hunted for where the series began, couldn’t find it in about ten seconds, and almost gave up. That gap is exactly what a start here page on your author website is for, and it’s the page most authors never build.
A start here page is one page that answers the question a brand-new reader is actually asking. Where do I begin, what is this series, is it for me, and where do I buy it. You spend so long inside your own catalogue that you forget the person who just showed up has read none of it and owes you nothing. If they have to click around three menus to work out the reading order, a lot of them quietly leave, and you never see it happen.
Why “start here” is suddenly doing double duty
Readers have started asking AI assistants for their next book the same way they used to ask the bookseller, or the friend who will not shut up about one particular series. I’m not here to tell you whether that is good or bad. It’s happening, and I would rather you were ready for it than pure about it.
Here is the practical part. The tools now answering those questions read a clear, structured page far better than they read a paragraph of beautiful prose. A page that plainly lists the series, the reading order, the tropes and the comps gives them something concrete to pull from. A page that buries all of that inside a lyrical welcome message gives them very little to work with.
I want to be honest about the ceiling, because plenty of people selling this will not be. None of this guarantees you a recommendation. There is no setting that makes an assistant name you, and anyone promising one is guessing. What a well-built page does is make you legible to a human skimming on their phone and to a machine trying to answer a question, instead of invisible to both. That is the part inside your control. I wrote the wider version of how answer engines find authors in a separate post, so I’ll keep this one on the page itself.
What goes on your author website start here page
Keep it concrete and keep it skimmable. A start here page earns its place when it carries the following in plain text on the page, not locked inside a graphic where neither a screen reader nor an assistant can read it:
- The series name and a one-line premise a total stranger would understand.
- The reading order, numbered. Book one, book two, book three. If there are novellas, or a recommended order that differs from publication order, say so in plain words rather than leaving the reader to reverse-engineer it from publication dates.
- A short character list: the names and who they are, so a reader can tell at a glance whether they have wandered into book four by mistake.
- The tropes, named the way readers actually search. Enemies to lovers, found family, slow burn. Those are the words a reader types into a search bar and the words an assistant matches against when someone describes the book they want.
- Two or three honest comps. “For readers of X and Y” tells a person and a machine which shelf you belong on in a single line.
- The buy links, by book and by store, so the reader who is sold does not have to go hunting.
None of that is decorative. Every line is a fact a reader needs before they commit, and a fact a machine can lift cleanly instead of guessing at.
Write it flat, not fancy
This is the page where your gorgeous prose instincts work against you. Use real headings, short lines, and plain sentences. Put the reading order in an actual numbered list, not woven into a paragraph. Keep the text as text, because a reading order rendered as a pretty image is invisible to the assistant and to any reader using a screen reader. Save the atmosphere for your book pages. The start here page is a signpost, and a good signpost is legible from a moving car.
Content warnings belong here too
Put your content warnings on this page, plainly. I use a ramp analogy with clients. If a building has a ramp, the people who do not need it walk straight past without a second thought, and the person who does need it can finally get in. Content warnings work the same way. The readers they do not apply to skim right over them. The reader who needs them stays, because you respected them enough to say so up front, and that reader goes and tells other readers. Hiding them to avoid scaring someone off costs you the people most likely to become loyal.
Where the page points
Your start here page is the hub, so send traffic to it on purpose. Point the back matter of your books at this page rather than at a raw retailer link that breaks the day a listing changes. And give the reader who is clearly interested somewhere to go next that you own, which usually means a newsletter signup sitting right there on the page, so the reader an assistant sent you does not leave as quietly as they arrived.
The honest limit
I cannot promise you that building this page will get you recommended by anything, and I would be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise. What I can tell you is that a clear start here page on your author website helps the reader who already found you actually start reading, and hands the tools now parsing the web something straight to work with instead of something to guess at. It lives on a site you own, it costs you an afternoon, and it does not depend on any algorithm deciding to like you this week. The reader who asked a machine for her next book still has to find chapter one once she lands on your site. Build the page that shows her where it is.