Writing the book was the easy part.
I don’t say that to be clever. Rise of the Phoenix: The Admiral’s Diaries took years, and there were long stretches where it went badly. But it was a problem I understood: sit down, do the work, fix what’s broken, repeat. The difficulty was honest.
What came after was a different kind of difficulty — the kind where nobody tells you the rules, everyone assumes you already know them, and the advice you can find online is either a sales pitch or six years out of date.
So here’s the list I wish someone had handed me. It’s not about craft. It’s the boring infrastructure that sits between finishing a manuscript and having anyone find it.
1. Decide What Name Goes on the Cover — Before Anything Else
This sounds like a non-decision. It isn’t, and it’s first on the list because every other item depends on it.
You have three options, and each has consequences:
Your legal name. Simplest, most honest, and the right default for most people — especially if your credibility comes from your life. In my case, readers care that the military, Peace Corps, and corrections background is real. A pen name would have cost me the only thing that makes my book different from the other thousand sci-fi thrillers published that month.
A variation. Initials, a middle name, dropping a hard-to-spell surname. Writers do this constantly and for good reasons: disambiguation, spelling, or because “R.J. Liddy” simply looks better on a spine than the full version.
A full pen name. Necessary if your day job creates a conflict, if you write in a genre you’d rather not discuss at family dinners, or if you plan to write across genres that don’t share an audience. Romance and hard sci-fi readers are not the same people, and a shared author name confuses both.
If you’re going the pen name route, resist the instinct to pick the first thing that sounds vaguely literary. The name has to survive being said aloud at a book club, typed into a search bar by someone who half-remembers it, and printed at eight-point on a spine. Running variations through a name generator is a reasonable way to break out of your own head — you’ll reject most of what comes back, but seeing forty options kills the paralysis of trying to invent one perfect answer from nothing.
Whatever you choose, choose it now. Changing it after your first release means orphaning every review, link, and search result you’ve earned.
2. Find Out Who Already Has That Name
This is the step almost every debut author skips, and it’s the one that quietly costs the most.
Author name collision is a genuine, boring, expensive problem. If a moderately successful author already publishes under your name — or something close enough that autocorrect and autocomplete can’t tell you apart — several things happen, none of them good:
- Readers searching for you land on their book and buy it instead.
- Your reviews and their reviews get emotionally merged by casual browsers.
- Retailer algorithms that key off author names start recommending their backlist to your readers.
- If they write something you’d rather not be associated with, you inherit the association.
The fix costs nothing: before you commit, run your intended author name through a name similarity check and search the major retailers directly. You’re looking for two things — how many people are already operating under that name or something adjacent, and whether any of them are prominent enough to dominate the search results.
If the name is crowded, you have painless options at this stage and expensive ones later. Add a middle initial. Use the full first name instead of the short form. Add a distinguishing element that you’ll use consistently forever. Five minutes now, or a permanent tax on every book you ever release.
The same check is worth running on your series title and any imprint name you invent. Titles aren’t protected the way you might assume, and a series that shares a name with a popular video game is a series nobody can find.
3. Your Website Is the Only Asset You Actually Own
Everything else is rented.
Social platforms change their algorithms, their ownership, their terms, and occasionally their entire reason for existing. Retailer author pages exist at the retailer’s pleasure and give you one template and no email list. Every writer who built an audience entirely on a single platform has a story about the morning the reach went to zero for reasons nobody explained.
A domain and a site you control is the one thing that survives all of it.
It does not need to be elaborate. Mine does five jobs, and that’s the whole brief:
- Says who I am, with the specifics that make the books make sense.
- Says what the books are, clearly enough that someone decides in fifteen seconds whether they’re interested.
- Sends people to buy, with the fewest possible clicks.
- Collects email addresses, because that’s the only audience that can’t be taken away.
- Publishes writing that isn’t the book, which is the part most authors get wrong — I’ll come back to it.
You don’t need custom development. A standard site builder gets you there in a weekend. What matters is that the domain is yours, the email list is exportable, and nobody can suspend it.
4. The Technical Part Nobody Warns You About
Here’s the failure mode that catches new authors: the site goes live, it looks good, and then for months almost nobody arrives from search.
The usual assumption is that the writing isn’t good enough or the topic is too competitive. Often the real explanation is dumber — large parts of the site were never properly indexed. Search engines found the homepage, crawled a little, and never worked out that a dozen other pages existed. Blog posts buried three clicks deep are especially prone to this, and an author site’s blog posts are almost always buried three clicks deep.
The fix is basic technical hygiene, and it’s a one-evening job:
- Verify the site in Google Search Console. This is non-negotiable and free, and it’s the only way to see what’s actually indexed rather than guessing.
- Generate and submit a proper sitemap so crawlers get a complete map instead of having to discover pages by luck. A sitemap generator handles this in a couple of minutes, and it’s worth regenerating whenever you add a batch of posts.
- Make sure every page is reachable by a normal link from somewhere, not only through a menu that loads via script.
- Give each page a title and description written for a human, not stuffed with keywords.
- Check that the site loads quickly on a phone, because that’s where most of your readers are.
None of this is marketing. It’s plumbing. But an unindexed page is functionally a page that doesn’t exist, and there’s no amount of good writing that fixes an indexing problem.
5. The Tool-Trial Trap
Somewhere in month two you’ll discover the publishing-adjacent software industry, and it will discover you.
Newsletter platforms, review-copy distribution services, cover mockup generators, ad management dashboards, formatting tools, book promotion sites, ARC reader networks, keyword research suites. You will sign up for a dozen in a week just to see what they do. Most you’ll use once.
Two practical consequences worth planning for.
First, every one of those signups permanently adds your address to a marketing database, and a meaningful number of those databases will be sold, breached, or simply mailed forever. If you’re only evaluating a tool and haven’t decided whether to keep it, a temporary inbox is enough to get through the trial without handing over the address you actually publish under. Keep your real author address for the handful of services you commit to.
Second — and this is the more useful trick — once your own newsletter signup is live, test it with a throwaway address yourself. Subscribe as a stranger and watch exactly what arrives: the confirmation email, the welcome message, the timing, whether it lands in spam. Almost every author I’ve compared notes with found something broken the first time they did this. A confirmation that never sent. A welcome sequence addressed to “FIRSTNAME.” A signup form that silently failed on mobile.
You cannot see your own funnel from the inside. Go stand outside it.
6. Write the Things Only You Can Write
This is where most author blogs die, so it’s worth being blunt.
The instinct is to write about the book. Chapter teasers, character spotlights, cover reveals, release countdowns. The problem is that nobody searches for those things, because nobody knows your book exists yet. You’re producing content for an audience that doesn’t arrive until the content works.
What does work is writing from the part of your life that produced the book — the expertise underneath it. For me, that’s what institutions do to people, how systems fail under pressure, what military and corrections work actually teaches you about human behavior. Those are things people search for, argue about, and share. They bring in readers who’ve never heard of me, and some fraction of them notice there’s a novel built on the same foundations.
Ask yourself what you know that most people writing in your genre don’t. That’s your content. The book is the destination; it isn’t the road.
Three to four solid pieces on that expertise will outperform thirty promotional posts, and they’ll keep working for years after a countdown post has expired.
7. Build the List From Day One
Email remains the only channel where you own the relationship. No algorithm sits between you and the person who asked to hear from you.
Put a signup on every page. Give people a real reason to join — a first chapter, a short story, a piece of background material that isn’t in the book. “Sign up for updates” converts poorly because it offers the reader nothing except more email.
Then actually write to them, on a schedule you can sustain. Quarterly that you keep is better than weekly that you abandon after five issues.
What to Skip
Equally important, because the money and time you don’t waste here is the money and time that goes into the next book.
Don’t buy a publicist before you have a book people can find. A publicist amplifies something that already works. If your site isn’t indexed and your list has eleven people on it, there’s nothing to amplify, and you’ll pay several thousand for the privilege of learning that.
Don’t run ads in month one. Advertising into a cold catalogue with no reviews and no second title is how first-time authors lose a few hundred dollars and conclude that marketing doesn’t work. Ads make sense when you have a functioning conversion path and something for readers to buy next.
Don’t chase every platform. Pick one social channel where your actual readers are, do it properly, and ignore the rest without guilt. An account you post to twice a year is worse than no account, because it looks abandoned.
Don’t redesign the site. You’ll be tempted, repeatedly. The design isn’t why nobody’s reading. Write another piece instead.
What This Actually Takes
Being honest about the timeline, since most of the advice online isn’t: the naming and collision checks are an afternoon. The site is a weekend. The technical setup is one evening. The content is permanent and slow, and it’s the only part that compounds.
Nothing here is difficult. It’s just unglamorous, and it doesn’t feel like writing, which is why it gets postponed until the book has already launched into silence.
Do it before. The book deserves a place to land.