What?

A lot of folks (including me) go for the classic ‘firstnamelastnameauthor.com’.

If you can get just your firstname and lastname, you might also want to go for that - although if your name is particularly tricky to spell, it might be worth picking something else. Author Caimh McDonnell (pronounced Qweev) went for ‘whitehairedirishman.com’, for example.

Another option is to take something from one of your books, perhaps the setting or title of one - although be careful this doesn’t box you into a corner. As your career develops, people are more likely to want to follow you, than one book series.

If you write cross-genre, it might be worth considering a site for each genre. If you have more than one pen name, I’d say you definitely want a site for each.

Don’t agonise over this - you can always add more domains later, if you diversify your writing. Or you can ‘park’ an old domain and send it to your main one. All my writing is at ‘markhoodauthor.com’, but I have a couple of others that just redirect there, rather than having their own website set up.

And I would advise getting a .com, rather than any of the ‘new’ top-level domains. The others can be cheaper (though not always), but are mostly aimed at certain industries (.bar, .accountant, etc.) Maybe you’re a horror author, and want .boo as a top-level domain - by all means, go for it. But consider whether it gives the impression you want it to. Also check renewal rates, sometimes they hook you in with a cheap first year and then ramp it up. And finally you might find some readers still want to add ‘.com’ to the end anyway, and you end up explaining it every time.

At the end of the day, though, most people click links or search for something, rather than typing in a whole URL. It doesn’t matter as much as you might have been told.