Are you an author looking for a suitable WordPress theme to showcase your work? No wonder—the popularity of paper books, audiobooks, and e-books today combined with the free CMS (content management system) such as WordPress, used by over 43% of indexable websites, makes an ideal pair. The theme will only enhance the experience for the users, let you provide relevant information in a readable format, and add features such as ads, newsletters, call-to-action buttons, and so much more. Most importantly, the website will represent your personality or niche. For those reasons, let’s dig into the best WordPress themes for authors.
1. Astra
Astra is a free and premium WordPress theme for authors that excels in so many areas. The free one has a 5-star rating on WordPress.org and over 1 million active installations. If you opt for Astra Pro and Essential Bundle, i.e., paying, you get an add-on with a one-click demo installation of over 180 premium templates, many book and writing related. Thanks to SEO friendliness, custom widgets, WooCommerce integration, the ability to customize colors and typography (800+ Google Fonts from the get-go), frequent updates, and blazing-fast speed, you can rely on this theme long-term.
2. Author Pro
Now for the top representative among WordPress themes for authors named Author Pro. It works in unison with the Genesis Author Pro WordPress plugin to provide a clean, modern, easy-to-browse website that will show your work and grow your audience. It makes it easy to scale up, import templates, edit offer promo downloads, sell products, and demonstrate your work. You can easily add the author’s name, ISBN, publisher, edition, editor, publication date, and available formats for each book. In conclusion, it’s adequate for amateurs and established authors in the industry alike.
3. Divi
Divi is yet another premium but multifunctional example of leading WordPress themes that can be used for authors. It comes with over 100 website templates you can fully edit with the inbuilt Divi Page Builder. It is fast, SEO friendly, translation ready, and comes with many demo pages for publishers, writers, authors, and bookstores. The theme is beginner-friendly, permits global style changes, supports videos and animations, and is simply the go-to if you seek versatility or like tweaking your website often.
4. Auteur
Auteur is another specialized theme for authors, publishers, bloggers, bookstores, book distribution companies, reviewers, and much more. It suits beginner writers and professional authors with hundreds of thousands of books and many daily sales. It comes with a modern design, beautiful colors, fast-loading pages, a neat user interface, and superb navigation. More importantly, it works with Elementor and WPBakery page builder plugins and supports Slider Revolution to make editing straightforward. That lets you modify backgrounds, animations, header, footer, promotions, about author, and 10+ blog page types.
5. Ultra
Are you seeking free themes for authors built for WordPress? We don’t blame you since those we mentioned require payment or at least a premium version for most features and templates. Ultra is gratis and used on over 7000 websites at the time of publication. Although it’s built as a general business site, it can be customized for bloggers and authors and has awesome portfolio pages to show your books. Unsurprisingly, it’s lightweight, loads fast, is translation-ready, and has full-length and one and two-column modes. However, the “issue” is that it uses SiteOrigin’s page builder plugin rather than more popular options.
6. Narratium
Although the name Narratium suggests “spoken word”, it is optimized for blogging, writing, and promoting books, ebooks, and audiobooks. It looks modern and focuses on simplicity, meaning WordPress Block Editor or Gutenberg Editor is sufficient for all your needs. You can reuse the template for all kinds of pages, such as posts, author profiles and portfolios, categories, and much more. It is also mobile-friendly and comes with several color schemes applicable globally or for each post or page. You can add images, avatars, icons, word counts, read time, and so much more.
7. BookPress
BookPress is a WordPress theme designed for bookstores, but also has over 4 landing pages, over 20 inner pages, and support for book publishers, book writers, authors, and even agents and affiliate marketers as it comes with showcase pages and online library and online bookshop. It is based on Bootstrap 5 and WPBakery and uses WooCommerce to provide all the selling features. BookPress also supports author information, author landing page, testimonials, and product page, and is responsive, SEO friendly, fast, has many color schemes, Slider Revolution, right-to-left support, and multi-author support.
8. Leona
Leona is yet another great choice for authors and books writers, including electronic, audio, and paper books. It lets you present your current titles but also announce upcoming releases, book events, tours, samples, full biography or excerpts, and a portfolio About Me page. You can also sell books with the built-in store, let users translate the page via WPML, use Mailchimp newsletter, and utilize over 10 inbuilt shortcodes to add or remove portions of the page. We also liked the included page flip effect animation.
9. Cetara
Cetara is a go-to theme for publishers, bookstores, book distributors, authors, reviewers, and all kinds of writers and bloggers. It is heavily sale-driven, meaning it’s ideal for e-book and audiobook writers that want to use its eCommerce tools to showcase books and relevant information including quick view, testimonials, wishlist, and filtering. Website owners also get statistics and recommendations to boost their sales. Nonetheless, the theme is responsive, Retina ready, and has over 5 homepages and other page layouts for about me, blog, and contact forms. You also get a header and footer builder tool and mega menu support.
10. Crator
Crator is usually the go-to option for bloggers and influencers, but it has all the necessary tools for an author. You can create project portfolios, showcase books, make custom pages, and sell your products and services. It comes with 5 homepage demos and plenty of inner page templates, headers, and footers. The theme is fully responsive, supports CSS3 animations and HTML5, and has custom post types for Projects and Services. Finally, it uses Elementor, Slider Revolution, Contact Form 7, Google Fonts, MailChimp, and WPML.