You can sell books without a website, and a lot of authors do it for years. The question worth answering is narrower than "do I need one", because it depends on which jobs you want done and who you want doing them. Here is what a site covers, what Amazon already covers, and how to tell which side of the line you are on.
What Amazon already gives you for free
Amazon Author Central is free to anyone with a book listed on Amazon. You claim your titles, add a bio and a photo, and readers get a Follow button that triggers an email from Amazon when you publish something new. For a first-time author with one book out, that covers the basic "who is this person" question a browsing reader might have.
What you do not get is the reader's email address, any say over how the page looks, or any way to contact your followers on your own schedule. Amazon decides when the new-release email goes out, who receives it and what it says. If your account is ever suspended, the page and the followers go with it.
The jobs a website does that Amazon will not
- Collecting email addresses you own, usually by offering a free story or a first-in-series in exchange for a signup.
- Selling direct, where you keep most of the cover price instead of 70 per cent minus delivery fees, and you know who bought.
- Giving reviewers, bloggers, podcasters and bookshops somewhere to find your covers, blurb and bio without emailing you for them.
- Holding everything that has nowhere else to live: your series reading order, your backlist across multiple retailers, your contact form, your privacy policy.
Only the last of those is really about having a page on the internet. The other three are about owning the connection, and that is usually the reason authors get tired of running everything through retailer accounts and social platforms.
When you can put it off
If you have not finished your first book, a website is procrastination with a domain name attached. If you have one book out and no plans for a second, the return on the time is low, and Author Central plus a decent Goodreads profile may do the job.
The point where it starts to pay is usually when you have something to give away. A reader who finishes book one and wants book two is worth capturing, and there is no way to capture them inside the Amazon ecosystem. Series authors tend to feel this earlier and harder than standalone authors.
What a minimum useful author site contains
Four pages will do: a home page that says what you write and offers the signup, a books page with buy links, an about page with a photo and a short bio, and a contact page. Anything beyond that is optional. A blog you update twice a year does more harm than an absent blog, so leave it out until you actually want to write one.
The signup form matters more than the design. If a reader lands on your site and leaves without joining your list, the site has done almost nothing for you.
The cost of assembling it yourself
The DIY route is a stack rather than a single purchase. Squarespace plans start around $19 a month billed annually. MailerLite halved its free tier in September 2025, from 1,000 subscribers to 500, which is a reminder that free tiers move. BookFunnel or StoryOrigin handles ebook delivery and ARC distribution. Direct sales need a storefront and a payment processor, and some storefronts act as seller of record for EU and UK VAT on digital goods while others leave that with you, so check before you commit.
None of those pieces is expensive alone. The cost that catches people is the wiring: four logins, four billing dates, and a signup form that has to talk to a mailing list that has to talk to a delivery service. Whether that is worth doing yourself depends on how much you enjoy that sort of afternoon.
The •BulletPoint Publishing Toolchest puts the website, mailing list, direct sales, ARC distribution and press kit behind one flat monthly fee, already wired together. Have a look at what is in it and see whether it beats the stack you would otherwise build.