Author Site And Book Site - Multiple Sites Bad Idea?

[JoshBowers2012]

The question:

I've been doing work for authors lately and a common question is if they should have a site for their book and a site for themselves. Separate sites with different domain names.

At first I thought this would be a bad idea. Why spread information across two sites if they can be related and used together in one?

But I see a lot of authors doing this and some with marketing companies. One site for the author with information about them, their books, their social media presence.

Then another site for their book, with new social media accounts, other info, etc.

What do you guys think? Has anyone tried both and seen any pros and cons? Is there a perfect answer?

[OrionGroup]

I think one site would make sense.

[mememax]

In SEO there's no perfect answer since the environment always changes.

I think that you should bet on one site and build there the whole value. Give to your authors a page where they can build their profile and link them to their g+ page (if they don't have it recommend them to build one) in that way you'll achieve extra exposure in serps with the tiny image of the author.

Then for the book try to rank both for their name a ISBN code which is more long tail always useful. You may also try to boost the traffic to those pages using some tiny adwords budget, so more authors may join your community and enlarge the authority of your site.