Many authors wear multiple hats.  Maybe you’re an author and an illustrator, or an author and a speaker, or an author of multiple genres, or an author and an educator.  It’s increasingly common that your author website needs to appeal to multiple audiences, but I know that some authors are confused about whether they can put everything they do in one website, or whether they need multiple websites, one for each audience.

And that’s a great question!  It’s really important to be thinking about the goal for your website and who it’s for.  The answer to whether you need multiple websites, one for each audience, almost always, is no.  And here’s why:

• Realistically, most people have budgetary and time constraints, and when you have multiple websites you multiply the cost and the work involved in creating and maintaining them.  Few people can afford that.
• Your online presence already exists in multiple places thanks to online retailers (eg: Amazon.com), social media, your publisher (if you have one), any articles written about you, etc…   and your website is ideally designed to be a hub to connect all of those things, in a way you can control.
• Even if you’re an author without other hats who writes for a single genre, or has written a single book, your site already needs to appeal to multiple audiences.  Primarily it’s for your fans and potential readers, but it’s also for future collaborators and media folks, so you need to be thinking about how to speak to all of them anyway.
• It’s relevant for folks to know you are the same person who wears multiple hats.  It’s wrong to assume that people will think it’s a negative thing to talk about your consulting services on the same site as you talk about your work as an author.  The trick is to consider your overall brand and what is the commonality, or the glue, that holds it all together?  You are, after all, the same person in all of these roles.
• If your time and financial budget allow, and your career has grown to the point where it only makes sense to break things out into multiple sites because otherwise, it would become too unwieldy (like you’re hiring employees and expanding your service offerings), you still want to mention on each site that the other site exists and that you are capable of multitudes.

There are many parts of life for which we need to compartmentalize ourselves, but this doesn’t have to be one of them.  Think about your strengths across all of your online efforts, work on your branding as a multi-faceted individual, and be confident about moving forward with a single website for all of your needs.