You know how to use your website, you know what it should include, and you’ve likely devoted a good chunk of time to collecting and creating the materials you’ll need to build your site.

If gathering content and preparing brand assets were all it took to build a great website, more authors would have one. It’s smooth sailing until authors hit the hairsplitting techno-tasks it takes to bridge the gap between the conception and creation of a site.

We’ll bring this series on profitable authorship to a close with the most rudimentary talk on marketing that one could possibly imagine. That isn’t to say that this article will be light reading; far from it. But marketing is a vast subject, a rather nebulous and ever-changing art that you’ll be learning for the rest of your life.

Now that we’ve tackled everything your readers need from your website, it’s time to turn our attention to your peers and the press. Whereas readers will land on your site without a particular objective in mind, the pros will know exactly what they’re looking for.

So, you’ve signed with a literary agent. Congratulations! If traditional publishing is your career goal, you’ve just taken a huge step forward. But that doesn’t mean your work is done—many authors get so focused on landing an agent they forget to think about what happens after they sign the contract—how they’ll work with their shiny new agent. Because, like any relationship, author/agent partnerships need tending, need to be productive and healthy—and can go wrong. So it’s paramount to not only know what a healthy author/agent relationship looks like, but also to know how to spot the danger signs that might mean you and your agent need counseling, fast.

No author website would be complete without books, though how and where to place them is the question. As with so much in life, the key is to break the connection between your identity and your activities. Just as your author persona is not you, neither are your books.

If you’re just starting out in your writing career, you might wonder how the whole agent thing works. Getting a literary agent often seems just as challenging as getting published, and you can’t undersell the importance of this decision and the relationship that results. Signing with an agent is a legal and financial relationship that shouldn’t be undertaken lightly, but the difficulty in securing an agent sometimes makes writers feel like they have zero power in the dynamic.

When a visitor lands on your website, you’ve got one chance to get them to take an action, or you might never see them again. In this sense, your entire website can be viewed as a delivery mechanism for calls-to-action, in much the same way a museum is a delivery mechanism for inspiration.

A website is 80% about the content, about creating, organizing, and presenting the many details of your author career. But to dismiss the remaining 20% of your site—the style—as unimportant would be a tragic mistake.

Separated by five thousand miles, the amusement parks in Santa Monica and in Asbury Park are basically identical—but Disney World is different. Why? Because Disney World has a brand.