What's New at AuthorLoft — August 2026

Hi there and Happy August 2026,

It's been a busy month of July around here, so instead of letting all of it sit buried in a changelog nobody reads, I wanted to send a quick personal note about what's changed.

If you're new to this list — AuthorLoft is a platform for authors to run their own website, sell books directly, and actually own their reader relationships instead of renting them from someone else. If you're already using it, here's what's different since you last logged in.

New Subscribers. We are slowly making gains in subscribers ( new authors ) as well as being seen on the web. We have now been Live for nearly 90 days, so we are in our first quarter of the first year as a startup. As the word gets out, we will continue to grow and improve. Thank you for all the new subscribers that are making AuthorLoft the newest and best author platform on the web!

Your site's web address doesn't have to be permanent anymore. Until a few weeks ago, whatever slug you picked at signup — yourname.authorloft.com — was locked in for good. No do-overs, even if you changed your pen name or just didn't love your first choice. That's gone now: head to Settings → Account and change it whenever you want. Your old address automatically redirects to the new one, so nothing you've already shared — social posts, business cards, backlinks — breaks, and you don't lose any search ranking in the process. Signup itself is simpler too: one step instead of two, so getting a site live now takes under a minute.

Readers can now email you directly from your homepage. Previously, someone had to already know to click "Contact" to reach you — nothing on your homepage or About page pointed there. There's now an "Email [Your Name]" link right where readers are already looking, one click from wherever they land. And when they do write in, the contact form now asks what it's about — reader question, book club invite, media inquiry, speaking request, and a few others — instead of a blank "Subject" field most people just skipped past. Small change, but it means the messages that reach you are easier to act on.

Your traffic numbers were wrong. They're fixed now. This one stung to find: the visitor-analytics dashboard every author sees had been silently showing zero traffic since launch — not because your site had no visitors, but because the tracking that actually counts a visit had never been fully wired up. If you've looked at your numbers before and thought "that can't be right," you were right. It's fixed, and your dashboard should now reflect real traffic.

Finding your way around your own dashboard got faster. There's a search bar at the top of your admin sidebar now (or just hit Cmd/Ctrl+K from anywhere) that jumps straight to any page or settings tab — type "billing" and land directly on the Billing tab, no more hunting through menus to remember where something lives.

A few smaller things worth knowing about:

• Achievement Badges — milestones (books published, revenue, reviews, and more) are now calculated automatically and can show on your About page and Bookstore listing. They're on by default; there's a toggle in Settings if you'd rather keep them private.

• Sign-in and account pages got a visual refresh — they actually look like AuthorLoft now instead of a generic template.

• A handful of broken links and a couple of buy-button bugs on older book listings got cleaned up.

If you're not on AuthorLoft yet and you're an author sitting on a mailing list of readers you don't fully control — this is worth five minutes. [Start your free site → www.authorloft.com]

If you're already here, log in and poke around. A few of these are easy to miss unless you know to look.

Thanks for reading this far — more soon.

— Andy
Founder, AuthorLoft