Greetings! And Author Website Question

Hi Everyone! I’m new here and can’t wait to learn from all of you. Thank you for sharing your experiences and questions!

Writing has always been my creative outlet, but I started and stopped writing a book so many times over the years, I didn’t complete one. Ever. I was all over the place with genres and ideas too, so that didn’t help. While teaching high school English, it was a challenge to find clean books to recommend to students, especially ones that could hold their attention, so that inspired me to write them. I’ve been working on a YA novel for the past year, which has been exciting, but as I’m diving into the five-year plan and listening to the podcast, I see there’s A LOT more to it than just write and publish. It feels overwhelming, but I want to do this well, so short stories, here I come!

Author website question: It sounds like creating an author website and building a newsletter following, is a primary step. As an unpublished writer other than a Christian blog from many moons ago, what would you point people to on a website or newsletter? I have no books published, no book covers, etc. What did other people do? Did you wait to publish something and then build on it?

Thank you for any input!

Jen