You have a real catalog. The reviews are steady or climbing. Readers who find you tend to stay and buy the next one. And the growth curve is still flatter than the quality of the work says it should be.
That was Dave Bartell’s position when he came to me. What follows is the author website strategy that came out of it, and the research that reordered the plan before a word of content was written.
He writes archaeological thrillers. Ten published novels in the Darwin Lacroix Adventure series, plus novellas, all under his own imprint, Triple Shot Press. The books work. His Goodreads averages climb across the series rather than fading, from 4.31 on the opening book to 4.61 on the most recently rated one, which is the shape every author wants and very few get. People who start it keep going, and think more of it the further in they go.
So the question was fair: why isn’t more of this reaching more people?
The Hook
The working assumption was social media. Post more, post better, get found.
Worth testing before committing a year to it, so I tested it. The diagnosis ran across the retail listings, the newsletter data, and every page of the existing website before anyone wrote a single caption. What came back reordered the whole plan.
The Plot Twist
The catalog was not the constraint. Retention was not either, and the rating climb had already proved that. The problem sat at the front of the funnel, inside the infrastructure nobody files under marketing.
Two findings did the reordering.
The first came out of the site audit. Thirty-eight pages on the existing site. Thirty of them carried no meta description at all, including all thirteen book pages. Sitting off the main navigation entirely, linked from nowhere, was a free ghost story called “Elmer,” pulling 849 search impressions. It was one of the handful of pages with both a real keyword-bearing description and a unique page title.
An author with ten novels had one page doing genuine organic work, and it was a short story he had given away.
The second finding came from his own newsletter reporting rather than any platform dashboard. His engagement spikes tracked new-release news, and nothing else moved the line. A list of nearly four thousand readers was doing exactly what it was built to do. Then I looked at who was actually reading: his primary audience skews male, 45 and up. BookTok and Instagram trend content were never going to reach those people. I had been one decision away from optimizing channels his readers do not use.
Retention was strong. Acquisition was the gap.
The Structural Outline: the author website strategy, in order
The order mattered more than any individual piece, so here is the reasoning behind it.
The website went first, ahead of any content push. Traffic driven into a site that cannot be found or cannot hold a reader is wasted twice. The rebuild moved him off the old host onto self-hosted WordPress: a series hub, individual pages for all thirteen titles, correct affiliate links throughout, and a written title and description on every page. The pages already earning search traffic kept their exact URLs. A long-misspelled URL was corrected and redirected rather than dropped.
Entry points became explicit second. Ten books reads as a wall to someone who has never read you, which is the exact series-discoverability problem new readers hit. The boxset of the first three became the primary entry point, book one the secondary, and the free novella the list-builder. The catalog did not change. The signposting did.
Channel strategy was rewritten third, once the audience data was in. Podcast guesting, participation in archaeology and history communities, and in-person bookstore appearances replaced the trend-chasing plan. His co-publisher runs the outreach. He goes back to writing. That division was the point.
Long-form content last. The “Elmer” finding said something specific about this site: research-led writing with real search metadata earns discovery here. A Substack now does deliberately what one orphaned short story had been doing by accident.
Editorial Notes
Where this sits today. The rebuilt site is built and staged, with a final visual pass and the cutover still to come. The old site stays live and untouched until it goes.
What has changed is structural. Every page on the new build carries real search metadata, against thirty of thirty-eight pages with none. Every buy link was checked individually against the correct affiliate destination, and an Audible button that pointed to the Amazon listing instead now goes where it should. The commissioned series artwork, the author photography, and the brand assets that existed nowhere but the old host were recovered at full resolution before the host was canceled.
The channel shift is already live. He has stopped spending his time on platforms his readers are not on, and has that time back for the next book.
The Appendix
This pattern applies to you if the opening of this post described your situation: an established catalog, healthy reviews, loyal readers, and growth that does not match the work.
If that is you, skip the content push for now. Find out what your existing system is already doing first, because it is usually doing something, and rarely the thing you assume. In the audits I have run, broken things turn up and get fixed. The genuine surprise is almost always a neglected page quietly outperforming everything that got the attention.
The diagnosis has to come before the plan. Otherwise you are optimizing in the dark, competently, in the wrong direction. That is the whole argument for building an author website strategy out of research instead of out of instinct.
Digital Strategy and Consulting starts where this case study started: research into what your site, your list, and your listings are currently doing, and a plan built from what that research says rather than from what everyone else is doing this year. If the website itself is the piece that needs work, author website design covers the build.
Frequently asked questions
What is an author website strategy?
It is a plan for your site built from what your listings, your list, and your existing pages are actually doing, rather than from generic advice. The research comes first, then the plan follows what it finds.
Should authors focus on social media or their website first?
Fix the website first. Driving traffic into a site that cannot be found or cannot hold a reader wastes the effort twice, so the infrastructure comes before any content push.
Why audit before building a plan?
Because the real constraint is usually not where you assume. In this case a forgotten free short story was the only page doing genuine organic work, and finding that reordered the entire plan.