As an author looking to build a long-term publishing business, you should consider and avoid platform and service lock-ins when it comes to your website and your web-related marketing activities.
Here are several examples of lock-ins you might unknowingly fall into with your website and marketing:
In all of these situations, your continuing web presence or book marketing capability fully depends of the platform or service provider staying in business and you are at the mercy of their pricing changes. If you no longer accept their pricing, or want to break free of this dependency, you need to start from scratch.
The worst-case scenario is when you pay a web designer or a developer a large sum of money to build your website on a propiertary platform. In this case you are spending lots of money only to be locked-in into recurring charges on platforms like Wix.
This is why, prior to making a decision about using a certain platform or a service, you should be aware of the long-term consequences and have clear understanding upfront of how you can opt out of the service and keep using your website. If the service provider does not provide a clear breakdown of all costs associated with their service, and information how you can opt out of their service without negative consequences for your author business, it's likely their business model depends on a lock-in.
Here at AuthorLandingPages.com, we are providing our landing page service for $50/year. That's less than your typical website hosting alone even though it includes custom website design, hosting, URL shortener and Universal Book Link services with custom domain. With such an affordable pricing, it's reasonable to expect hidden fees, increasing prices or a service lock-in.
The success of our business model depends on authors renewing hosting for their landing pages and quite a few authors using our service for their web presence, that's for sure. However, with the funding from book design and formatting services we have been providing to authors for over 11 years (since 2012), we were able to built this landing page service with authors' long-term success in mind.
For full transparency, here is the full list of charges for our service:
$50/year hosting fee (no long-term commitment). To use our service, you pay $50 per year to have us host your landing page for you. The first year payment also covers the custom landing page design, and setting up the website, URL shortener and Universal Book Link to work with your domain. You can decide to discontinue the hosting at any time.
$100 website source fee (optional). If you want to host your landing page yourself or with another company, you will need to pay this fee so we can provide website files completely independent of our infrastructure, which you can host yourself or with another company. It is not a "termination fee" - if you don't need or want your landing page any more, you can just cancel our hosting and never pay us another dollar.
While we might increase our prices for new websites in the future, we commit to never increase hosting charge and website source fee for existing landing pages. This means you can be confident that your yearly cost will never exceed $50.
What's the reason for the website source fee, then? For starters, providing thes files which will work without our hosting requires additional upfront development effort on our and per-website work. The second reason is that if we provided source files at no charge, it would encourage authors to request those files when they don't really need them, taking our time away from doing things which actually benefit authors. We would prefer it if no author ever paid this fee to us, but we are providing this as an option for those authors who might want to discontinue hosting their website with us and still use the design we created.
We would love for you to continue hosting with us for as long as you need your landing page, but we have taken steps to ensure that any essential features which are critical for your long-term author career continue to work if you decide to host the site yourself in the future. If you make a decision about moving away from our hosting shortly before the hosting renewal date, we can cancel the upcoming fee and continue hosting your site at no extra charge until you are fully set up on your new hosting.
When you pay the $100 fee, you get "static" HTML, CSS and JavaScript files which can be uploaded to any hosting and will work out of the box. There are no software dependencies or databases to set up, so you can make the website work on your new hosting yourself or with a quick email to your new hosting provider. (You can read more about differences between "static" websites and "platforms" like WordPress, if you are interested.)
What about URL shortener and Universal Book Link, you might ask. Don't they require our servers to work? Yes and no. When we initially set up these services for your domain, they depend on our infrastructure to work. When you decide to discontinue hosting with us, they won't work on our servers. However, the files we will create (after you pay the $100 website source fee), will allow you to avoid any disruption to functioning of the links once you put them on another hosting:
To summarize, there is no vendor, software or platform lock-in with us. You can also disconnect your domain from our hosting at any time by removing the DNS record added to your domain configuration when we first configured your domain to work with it.