Is Having An Author Website Useful If You're Already On Substack?

It depends. Are you into owning a solid piece of online real estate or being a tenant forever?

Whether you write on Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, or even just the bathroom wall, the question about having a writer’s website will always be legitimate.

Do we need one or don’t we?

I’m not the president of the internet so I can’t say for sure but I can offer my input based on fifteen years of writing online.

In my (never) humble opinion, anyone who writes online should always have a space they can call their own, OUTSIDE of any writing platforms. Whether you intend to write on your “author website” or not, I think you should have one as a home base.

I’m the perfect example of why.

From 2009 to 2019 I maintained a travel blog with tens of thousands of followers. In 2020, I chose to retire from that blog for personal reasons.

From 2019 to 2022 I wrote prolifically on Medium, publishing more than 400 articles and collecting over 5000 followers. In 2023, I let go of Medium and came to Substack.

And here we are.

Letting go of other writing spaces meant letting go of thousands of potential readers for anything I would write in the future.

Thankfully, I’ve always had my personal web space called, Written By Kristi.

I think of my website as a lighthouse. It doesn’t do much except stand on a lonely island, however, it guides anyone who has followed me for a decade or more to where I write at any given time.

Writers are not trees, we’re human. We don’t have to plant roots anywhere for longer than we want to and having a personal website allows us to shine a spotlight in the direction of where we are.

I have updated my website a hundred times over many years. Life experiences change, locations change, and niches change. So can your website. No one will ever lose track of you.

Other benefits of having your own website:

Beauty. Hands down this is my favorite reason. Websites just LOOK GOOD compared to platforms like Substack and Medium. We can customize websites to match our mood, our personality, or our far-out dreams from another planet if we want to.

Blogging. Even if your website just serves as a landing page for now, you have the flexibility to add a blog to it at any point. It's no secret that cross-posting is a powerful way to reach a wider audience and increase engagement on your content. By sharing content across multiple platforms, you can leverage different networks to gain maximum exposure.

Custom Names. I realize we can use custom domains here on Substack as well as over at Medium. But do you? And if you do, is it your actual name or is it a publication name? My website is Written By Kristi but my main Substack is Wildhood Wanted. They serve two very different purposes and I like the separation.

Adaptability. As mentioned, writers don’t have to be rooted anywhere. No matter where we end up writing, our website can serve as a road map to where we want people to find us.

Selling & Commerce. This is a big one in my opinion. Do you sell books? Might you sell courses in the future? Might you start coaching down the road? Yes, we can sell things pretty much anywhere but it just looks and functions better on a custom website. And if your website is on Squarespace (for example) everything you need to start selling is built in.

If you don’t know me and you’d like a more authoritative take on whether authors should have their own websites,

Russell Nohelty

is your guy. He’s kind of a boss around here and he’ll tell you how to build your own basic, beautiful one-page author website …in roughly 497 steps.

I’ll give it to you in ONE step, just in case you want it done before your 83rd birthday 😂

ASK ME to do it for you.

It is one of many services I offer as a Substack virtual assistant and luckily, nerding out on Squarespace is my idea of entertainment.

Do you have your own website outside of Substack? If so, feel free to share in the comments! We’re all about networking here…show us what you’ve got!