Can AI build your author website? 🤖
AI chatter is all the rage in all the author communities I am a part of - and very little of it is good! Authors, agents and publishers are - understandably - grappling with this huge change to our industry and at the moment, it feels as though we are all just waiting to see what happens when the dust settles.
I love technology. It’s the reason I do this job alongside my own writing. But even I am becomingly increasingly fed up of the insidious way it changes us on a fundamental level - not least with the way it steals our time (I really need to leave Instagram!) and focus.
And now, it seems, AI is coming for the one thing that makes humans human: our creativity.
Why AI means your author website is more important than ever →
I’m not even going to get started on the use of AI in writing books.
Except to say if you’ve ‘written a book’ using AI, then you haven’t written a book. As Matt Haig brilliantly put it, you’ve commissioned a book.
But let’s talk about author websites.
Many of my clients are tech-phobic, which is why they come to me! They need help getting their author website up and running and they don’t have the time or inclination to learn the skills required to launch an effective website.
Sneaking in stage left: AI tools.
Squarespace (my platform of choice) recently launched its own ‘website builder AI-wizard’ called Blueprint AI, which I reviewed here. While it had a few useful prompts, it created - as most things AI tend to - a very generic and basic author website full of limitations.
OK, so, confession time. I have tried to use AI to help me write blog posts in the past. Time-saver, right?
Wrong.
Despite me spending a lot of time and research on perfecting my prompts, and honing in on exactly what I wanted the post to be about, every single time I’ve done this, I’ve ended up with something really generic and bland and often just plain wrong. Something that basically needs completely re-writing.
And then I’ve set about re-writing it completely.
It saves me no time.
When it comes to blog posts, the only thing that I find ChatGPT helpful for is brainstorming ideas, and subject lines and also points to hit. Sometimes it thinks of things that I would have thought of it I’d had longer to sit around ruminating. But the actual content of the blog post is never good enough to publish.
And when it comes to building your author website, you’re going to end up in the same position. I promise.
So let’s run through all the reasons why you really, really, shouldn’t use AI to build you an author website:
1. It won’t be strategic
This is probably the most important thing of all.
Allow me an anecdote from my distant past.
Once upon a time, I worked for a major magazine company and we were launching a new website as a standalone content platform. I was on the content team, but we had an entire tech team in the IT department dedicated to building the website and adding features and different functionality for us when requested.
We were working on the homepage. We needed to add a new button for something (I can’t remember what, but it doesn’t matter). The content management system we used was not drag and drop like most platforms are today, and so the new button had to be hardcoded by a developer.
So, I contacted one of the developers and I asked her to add this button the homepage. I specified the wording for the button and the link that it should go to.
And she said ‘OK, no worries’.
A couple of hours later: ‘done!’
I clicked on the homepage. She had added the button. But the button was the wrong size and it was not in the brand colours of the website. It was tiny, right down the bottom of the page and very easy to overlook.
I went back to her and said ‘um, sorry, could you make the button bigger - we want people to notice it? And also, it should be this hex code (colour), like the other buttons on the site? And can we have it above the fold so that people notice it?’
‘OK, no worries.’
We went back and forth a few times before we got the button looking how we wanted it. And that’s because I was talking to a developer, not a designer. These are very different skills. She could do the tech stuff, but she wasn’t concerned with the look and feel, because that wasn’t her job. She wasn’t thinking about the strategy behind me wanting this button on the site, or what we were trying to achieve and get the visitor to do.
And that’s because design and development are totally different skillsets.
AI can do design, but it won’t do strategy. It will do exactly what you tell it to do. It will add a button. But the button will probably be in the wrong place and may be in the wrong colour unless you give it very specific instructions.
It won’t think for you - it won’t suggest what buttons you might need or want or where they would best be placed.
And you might not know what buttons you need or want. This is what a website designer is for - to help you think strategically about your specific goals for your author website, and how best to achieve them using the design.
Your author website should work hard for you. Perhaps you want to grow your mailing list. Perhaps you want to attract literary festival bookings. Perhaps you want to secure more school visits. Or perhaps your main goal is simply to make it easier for readers to discover your books.
Different goals require completely different website structures, and AI will not help you with this.
2. It WILL be generic
We all know now that AI tends to produce incredibly generic things.
If 100 authors asked AI to build an author website for them, using the same platform, the chances are that the results will all look yawningly similar.
Maybe that’s fine. If you want something very basic and forgettable.
But isn’t your book worth more than that?
It mystifies me the number of successful authors I see that have bland or generic websites!
I understand that many authors are words-people and not so in tune with visuals, but in order to grab a readers’ attention and showcase your unique creativity, it’s more important than ever to have an online presence that feels authentic to you and stands out from the crowd.
I know, it’s shit and annoying, but it’s true.
This industry gets more and more competitive every year, and you have to take every opportunity to make yourself memorable.
3. It doesn’t understand publishing
Maybe we can forgive it on this, because neither do I, to be honest.
But…
There are countless little details that make an author website different from a standard small business website, and lots of unique things to consider. Such as:
How should your books be organised?
Which retailer links should you include?
Do you need a dedicated media kit?
Should you display your Instagram feed on the website?
What's the best way to handle multiple pen names?
How do you make a series easy to navigate?
Should you add a blog?
These are questions that AI can't reliably answer because the answers depend on your particular career, genre and goals, as well as how much time you have to spend on keeping your website updated.
A website for a debut romance author needs something very different from a website for an established crime writer with ten books and a packed events-schedule. And a website for an indie author again needs something completely different again.
4. It’s (often) terrible at design
Anyone else heartily sick of those flyers that we’re drowning in at the moment?
This really made me laugh recently (and sigh, of course)
But my god. AI is SO bad at design!!!
AI can generate design ideas, but it doesn't have taste, intuition or judgement. It can't tell when something feels slightly off. It seems to have a visceral dislike of negative space, too?
Having a design eye is something that fascinates me. My brother-in-law is a graphic designer and he is honestly just so gifted at design. I feel as though I have picked up lots of ‘design rules’ over the years (I used to work on interior design magazines, so met lots of talented designers there) but even so, I still work mainly off instinct.
For example, with a recent author website I built, I was pretty happy with the design but there was something missing. It took me a while to figure it out, then I realised that the website needed a very thin white site-wide border. I added one, and the design came together.
There is a real skill in sensing when something isn’t quite right, even if the ingredients used should have - on paper - created something that worked.
AI can’t see and it can’t emote and it can’t distinguish between an acceptable website and an excellent one.
And it’s shit at designing flyers.
5. It WILL make mistakes
Squarespace have an AI tool to help you add meta descriptions to pages and alt-text to images on your website.
How to use Squarespace’s new AI alt text tool →
When it first launched, I was really excited. But it was short-lived when I read the random descriptions it came up with.
I still give it a go every time in hope, but more often than not, it has mistakes in or just sounds completely clunky and weird and I have to re-write it entirely.
Basically AI needs a human overlord to double-check everything it does!
But that human overlord also needs to understand what they are doing.
AI presents everything it creates with complete confidence (no imposter syndrome here!).
But if you - the human being - don't understand what you're looking at, it's very easy to assume that everything it has produced is correct.
Risky business.
On a budget but need an author website?
The DIY Author Website Course is just for you! →
6. It won’t save you time
Like I said before, I am coming to realise that AI is not as much of a time-saver as it’s being repeatedly sold to us as.
Yes, it can save you money. But it’s the same principle as that ‘buy cheap, buy twice’ thing.
AI can make you a website on the cheap, but it’ll probably have so much wrong with it that you’ll spend hours of your life trying to fix it up.
Allow me another of my favourite aphorisms: you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.
Ask yourself which you value more when you decide to get AI to build your author website for you!
7. It’s not a human being, dammit!
I love my job and I love working with my author clients. I love getting to know them and some of them have become true friends. I love hearing about their ups and downs and offering words of comfort and/or wisdom when I can, because I UNDERSTAND what they’re going through. Because I’ve been there too.
But also… how much nicer is it when you phone a customer service line and you get a real human, instead of an automated voice asking you to press buttons so that it can funnel you through to an automated message telling you to visit their website instead?
How many times have you muttered under your breath ‘I just want to talk to someone!’ as you listen to the stupid chirpy voice telling you ‘your call is important to us’ as you wait?
This is what it’s like if you use AI to build your author website. Painful, protracted, frustrating, inhuman.
When you work with a flesh-and-blood web designer, you get to talk to someone real, who really cares about the work they are producing on your behalf, in a way that only other humans can.
I do think, honestly, that this is worth so much and in the coming years, this human connection is going to be the thing we are all starved of - the thing we all reach for in our desperation for a relationship outside of a screen.
Conclusion
Like I said in the intro to this piece, I’m a techy person and I find technological advances really interesting and inspiring.
But AI, I’ll be honest, has truly underwhelmed me over the past six months.
Your author website is a critical part of your marketing toolkit.
AI is deeply mediocre - like an underqualified assistant that believes they’re much better than they are. And believes it so forcefully that you run the risk of being swept up in its hype.
But you wouldn’t outsource your author website to an assistant who designed terrible flyers, made constant (insane) mistakes and had absolutely no ingenuity or intuition.
So don’t outsource your author website to AI. It deserves better!
Want me to build you a website?
My streamlined yet personal approach, perfected over the past 6 years of building websites for ambitious authors just like you, means I can create your dream author website without overwhelming you with tech jargon or confusing decisions, supporting you throughout the whole process and gently guiding you with my expertise.
Find out more, then get in touch. I would love to hear from you!
