Good morning to all of the SE readers, this is P. H. with more author essentials for you today. These posts are mainly geared toward newer authors, but those who have been at it for a while may find these helpful as well. New authors will not always ask what they need beyond their writing to help themselves and that’s where this series is meant to help. Domains were discussed in part one of the series. You can read about that previous post here, and I hope it will help you get up to speed on this series. That post focused mainly on where you should start building your author brand. The choice of a domain is where you should begin, but there are two other details on which you should focus, the next one being your email address. It’s important to understand that you need to plan these before taking action because you may be working on all three at the same time.

An email address is your main communication tool for reaching out to the reader community, doing business, and handling any number of social media and other business related accounts you may eventually have. Your email address is valuable for communicating with anyone who inquires about you and your work, and this is fundamental to a later post which will cover newsletters and subscribers.

Having already created your domain, now you can create your email address based on your domain. Your domain name will be used in the email address which should be everything after the @. This points back to the importance of the domain which is an Internet address that directs people to your website and, in this case, uses your inbox is your primary communication tool.

The suggestion here is you should create at least one mailbox where your author name is clearly used in some fashion for the part front of the@. So the name designates the inbox to which communications will go the @ is the indicator of where that box located, and the domain is the destination.

Next, you may be required to choose some sort of host for your email inbox. If you choose a specific email host, you will likely pay a larger fee, some of those even charge based on the amount of email you send and receive per month. Frequently when you sign up for your your website, regular hosts may offer hosting your email accounts for your domain as part of their package.

But again, you must consider your budget when you are setting up these three basic author essentials, so a package with a host may be fairly expensive as they bill out per year at the cheapest rate. I tended to balk at paying so much money when I had so many other things to consider like editing and cover artwork. Without knowing if I were going to be successful, I would be spending even more money and might waste it. The solution for my purposes of remaining as low-budget as possible, was to choose Gmail as my email host which only costs five dollars a month. Couple that with the expense of $10 for the first year of my domain registration and a free site on WordPress and I was spending a small fraction of what I could’ve spent on hosting for three years on these essentials.

There are instructions on WordPress for using Gmail as your host and configuring your site to send email to your domain. This kind of information was very helpful in making my decisions. Also, you can use Zoho or other services and WordPress has more help articles for email configuration/hosting that are helpful. Remember, I’m not endorsing using Gmail, just mentioning that I use it. There are a lot of services you can use but check the WordPress link for instructions to understand what the best ones are if you are on WordPress. Otherwise, check your hosting provider for more information.

So in closing, let me review the importance of setting up your email as one of your first two steps.

• First, since you have your domain, you will be able create your email address for communication.
• Second, the email address is important because you will use it in creating your website and any number of social media accounts and other business accounts firmly establish your author brand.
• Next, you will be able to use your email address for a newsletter or any other correspondence directly with readers. An email address is seemingly a small detail, but it is highly important to get it right so that your branding is consistent with your domain and website as you begin to communicate with the reader community about yourself as an author and your writing. This branding is subtle but highly important when considering the consistency of your author brand.

Hopefully, I have communicated the importance of a domain and your email address in branding yourself as author in order to effectively present your work and communicate with the reading world via the internet. In the next post, I will cover the how and why basics of choosing and creating a website as well as using a blog site. From there we can get into other essentials that you should be using as you work on your first book or two. I hope you have found something useful for your author branding, even if you are already published in some way and are just using a basic Gmail account. If you’re using such an account, you should consider branding your author presence better with a domain associated email box. For more reference about branding, consider C. S. Boyack’s suggestions in his previous post on the subject.

Thanks for stopping by today on Story Empire and I hope you have a wonderful day. How did you go about setting up your communications for your new author business? What can you do to better brand your presence as an author on the internet? Please leave your answers and thoughts in the comments section and I will respond as soon as I can.