If you’re a writer, choosing the right WordPress author theme is important to provide an excellent reading experience for your audience while effectively showcasing your work and building connections.
We have been testing WordPress themes for different niches for 15+ years, and we have found the perfect solution for each industry, including our businesses.
Our choice of themes stands out in terms of design, functionality, and user ease. Whether you’re looking to promote your latest book, host a blog, or sell your publications directly from your site, our list has options that cater to diverse authorial needs.
Plus, we’ve included both premium and free WordPress themes for authors to suit different budgets. This allows you to focus on what you do best: writing.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress themes for authors and writers like yourself.
Building a WordPress Site for Authors
WordPress is the most popular website builder among authors and writers. It allows you the flexibility and freedom to build your website and grow your author profile to connect with readers.
Before you start, you need to make sure that you are using the right type of WordPress. There are two types of WordPress websites: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. You can read our guide on WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org to learn about the differences.
You need WordPress.org for your website. A self-hosted WordPress.org site gives you the freedom to use all of WordPress’ features and functionality.
You also need a domain name and hosting. A domain name is your site’s address on the web, like wpbeginner.com or google.com. Web hosting is the storage for all your website files.
We recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress hosting partner.
Bluehost offers WPBeginner users a huge discount on hosting, plus a free domain name and SSL certificate.
Once you have signed up for hosting, you are now ready to install WordPress.
Follow the instructions in our complete step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog, and your site will be ready in no time.
After installing WordPress, it’s time to choose a WordPress theme. Simply select a theme from our expert pick below.
For help adding your theme to your site, check out our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress theme.
No, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress themes for authors. This list contains both paid and free themes.
1. SeedProd
SeedProd is the best WordPress theme and website builder. It isn’t a regular theme, but you can use SeedProd to make a website for authors, writers, and bloggers.
It comes with ready-made website templates that you can import in one click. It’s also easier to customize your website using the native drag-and-drop builder.
As an author, you can set up your website from scratch. It lets you easily add custom headers, content, images, videos, and links.
You can also customize colors, font, background, and more. SeedProd is beginner-friendly and supports WooCommerce to sell eBooks on your WordPress site.
2. Divi
Divi is a powerful WordPress theme and drag and drop page builder that comes with hundreds of pre-built templates. Their author layout is perfect for creating a website to showcase your book and connect with your audience.
You can import the Divi author layout with just a few clicks and have a ready-made website that’s mobile-responsive. It will include a gallery, shop, landing pages, social buttons, and more. It’s easy to replace Divi’s demo content with your own using the drag-and-drop page builder tools.
Divi’s powerful page builder lets you easily change the design of your site. You can choose unlimited colors and pick from a full range of Google Fonts. You don’t need to know any CSS code to tweak the design of your site.
3. Neve
Neve is a highly customizable WordPress theme perfect for authors, bloggers, and eCommerce sites selling books. It comes with flexible layout choices, multiple homepage designs, custom widgets, page templates, and more.
It can be used for a multi-author magazine website or a single-author profile. It also includes a portfolio page, photo galleries, and beautiful sliders. Neve is WooCommerce-ready and supports all the powerful page builder plugins like Beaver Builder and Elementor Pro.
4. OceanWP
OceanWP is a powerful free WordPress theme with multiple ready-made websites. These include a template for authors, writers, and booksellers. It can be installed in one click and needs no coding skills.
OceanWP offers a beautiful and flexible layout design with eCommerce support to sell books. It’s translation ready and can be used to create a multilingual website.
It’s easy to change your theme settings in the live customizer. OceanWP is SEO-friendly, which helps your site to be found in search engines. You can learn more about this theme in our detailed OceanWP review.
5. Ultra
Ultra is a modern and powerful WordPress theme to sell your books online. It has a full-width header area on the homepage to add a featured image or display your books in an image slider. You can include a call-to-action button so readers can buy your books straight away.
This theme covers all you need as an author, including a testimonial section, so the readers can leave reviews and rate your books. You can also add an author section to share your story professionally.
6. GeneratePress
GeneratePress is a top-quality WordPress theme designed for book authors, writers, and bloggers. Inside, you will find dedicated blocks to present and showcase your best content. The theme offers great readability with beautiful typography and a spacious layout.
It has an elegant navigation menu. It also adds social sharing icons and an excerpt below each article so your users can easily share content.
The theme is a complete package and works with popular page builders. It’s also suitable for use with RTL languages.
7. Presence
Presence is designed to help you quickly create your website. It works perfectly for bloggers, writers, freelancers, and book authors.
It includes demo websites with various blog layouts. You simply need to replace the content with your own to build your website.
Presence is mobile responsive, and it comes with many powerful features such as a photo gallery, eCommerce support, sliders, and more.
8. Authority Pro
Authority Pro is a WordPress theme designed specifically for libraries, authors, and ebook stores. It has a simple, intuitive design that’s easy for your visitors to use.
Author Pro allows you to display your best-selling books on the homepage. You can create a custom navigation menu to add landing pages, categories, and tags to help readers find books that they want to buy. Author Pro is a fully responsive WordPress theme that’s optimized for SEO.
StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.
Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!
9. Astra
Astra is a multipurpose WordPress theme that can be used to create an author’s website. It has the perfect layout for authors, with a separate blog page to connect with readers. The theme comes with a responsive design and crisp typography to help your website stand out.
It supports WooCommerce for adding an online store, multiple theme layouts, and social sharing icons. Astra has custom widgets, homepage sections, an image gallery, an ‘about me’ section, and more.
You can use popular page builder plugins with Astra, or you can use the WordPress block editor.
Astra is also designed for good WordPress SEO (search engine optimization) to help your site rank well in Google and other search engines.
10. True North
True North is an elegant WordPress theme with an attractive design. It uses a grid layout on the homepage with a beautiful display of images. It has multiple layout choices and a built-in portfolio section to showcase your work.
It also supports custom background and header and has several custom widgets for social media and content discovery features.
11. Magazine
Magazine is a stylish WordPress theme with a magazine-style layout for authors and writers. It comes with multiple theme designs and supports the Themify drag and drop builder to create your pages.
The other features include a slide menu, mega menus, widgetized areas, social share buttons, related posts, a footer menu, and amazing typography.
12. Binder Pro
Binder Pro is a well-crafted WordPress theme designed for publishing. It’s perfect for content-rich websites like magazines and personal blogs. Inside, there are ready-made websites that can be installed with one click.
Binder Pro uses modules and allows you to drag and drop them to build your own layouts as well. It has multiple sidebars, header styles, icon fonts, unlimited custom sidebars, and full WooCommerce support.
13. Magazine Pro
Magazine Pro is a WordPress theme for authors and bloggers with a professional and minimalist design. It’s built on top of the powerful Genesis Framework. The most notable features of the theme are crisp typography and a beautiful display of images.
It has a widgetized homepage layout which lets you easily drag and drop widgets or add shortcodes. You will also find multiple page templates, a custom header, and WooCommerce support.
14. Elegant
Elegant is a WordPress blog and portfolio theme. It features a beautiful layout with the logo and navigation menu on top with a social menu. It has multiple layout options, including a grid layout.
Elegant has a built-in portfolio content type, several custom widgets, multiple color schemes, and an easy-to-use theme options panel. It ships with a drag-and-drop page builder and WooCommerce support.
15. Sydney Pro
Sydney Pro is a stunningly beautiful WordPress blog theme for authors. It features a unique homepage style designed to showcase your content prominently using images and text.
With Sydney Pro, you get beautiful animations, multiple page layouts, and custom content discovery widgets. It has an image slider for your website’s homepage with individual settings for each slide.
The theme seamlessly integrates with your favorite WordPress plugins, including WPForms, WooCommerce, and more.
16. Spencer
Spencer is a stylish WordPress blog theme with a beautiful design. The homepage features a full-width header image with a welcome note and call-to-action button that can lead users to your landing page.
The theme has several layout options and templates for different pages. You also get several custom widgets for easy social media integration and content discovery features.
17. Corner
Corner is a powerful WordPress theme built for any type of website. It includes an easy-to-set-up homepage with multiple sections to share your featured stories beautifully.
The theme has a sidebar navigation menu with welcome text and a custom logo. It also has built-in social media icons in the sidebar. Plus, it’s fully compatible with WooCommerce to sell your books online.
18. Landing
Landing is a perfect choice of WordPress theme for selling ebooks. It has many built-in templates designed specifically to help authors, writers, and bloggers to create a website.
Its features include a portfolio post type to create your bookshelf, an event post type to host your book-launching events, and WooCommerce support to sell your books online.
19. Float
Float is an elegant minimalist WordPress theme for authors, writers, and bloggers. It comes with multiple pre-designed demos to quickly launch the website and start adding your content. The homepage has a portfolio section to showcase your books in the masonry style.
You get header layouts, navigation menu styles, a transparent header option, and layout design settings to customize the theme. Float has eCommerce support with the integration of WooCommerce and requires no additional settings to create an online store.
20. Author
Author is a free WordPress theme for authors and publishers. It focuses on accessibility and has a beautiful clean design. It loads fast, and the code is optimized to improve the performance of your WordPress site.
It uses a simple two-column layout with a sidebar and navigation menu to the right. It’s easy to set up and can be customized using the WordPress theme customizer. It’s compatible with all standard WordPress plugins to add extra elements to your site, such as a contact form.
21. Jason
Jason is a modern WordPress theme for authors and storytellers. It’s designed to create an immersive experience with the help of audio, video, images, and text.
Relieve offers long-form content with beautiful scrolling effects. It also comes with a page builder and tons of customization options. It’s easy to set up and ships with a 1-click demo content installer.
22. Indigo
Indigo is a gorgeous multipurpose WordPress theme. It comes with easy-to-use modules that you can just drag and drop to build your homepage layout.
It also includes ready-made websites that you can use as a basis for your site. These websites include a blog, magazine, and stories theme that would work perfectly for blogging or for author websites.
23. Modules
Modules is a beautifully designed WordPress theme perfect for authors and bloggers. It uses a modular approach to design and comes with several ready-to-use modules that you can drag and drop to build your layouts.
It also includes multiple demo websites that you can install and use as a starting point for your website. Inside the theme, you will find several custom widgets, unlimited sidebars, header styles, video background support, Google Fonts, and WooCommerce support.
24. Extra
Extra is a perfect theme for bloggers and online publications. It’s built on top of the Divi page builder by Elegant Themes, so you can easily customize the layout as needed.
Extra gives you a lot of flexibility to create different categories, homepages, and story-driven blog posts.
Like all Elegant Themes designs, Extra is mobile responsive and comes with all the powerful features that you can expect, such as galleries, social sharing, sliders, and more.
25. Nozama
Nozama is a WooCommerce-based theme that makes it easier for you to sell your books online. It has product pages and a homepage section to display your books professionally. You also get a customizable storefront with multiple settings for product layouts, element visibility, and product filters.
This theme supports the Elementor builder to easily design your pages using drag-and-drop tools. It’s responsive and retina-ready. Also, you can use a sticky menu on your site.
26. Angle
Angle is a multipurpose theme for WordPress websites. Authors can use it to display their books beautifully. It comes with a sticky menu, lazy loading images, a quick preview portfolio, animations, parallax scrolling, and more.
It features hundreds of font icons and stunning typography. With page builders like Beaver Builder or Visual Composer, you can easily create pages on your website. Angle also allows you to create a multilingual website with WPML.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress theme for authors and writers.
You may also want to see our other guides that help improve your website, present your work professionally, and reach out to more people.
Best WordPress Guides for Author Websites
- How to Create an Author Website in WordPress (Step by Step)
- Best Free Author Bio Box Plugins for WordPress
- How to Write Powerful Headlines Using AI (Explained)
- How to Write a Great Blog Post (Structure + Examples)
- Best Ways to Use OpenAI on Your WordPress Website
- The Ultimate Guide to Boost WordPress Speed & Performance
- Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
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Michael Biferno
Very helpful. I’m already subscribed. Thanks for your article.
WPBeginner Support
Glad our article was helpful
Admin
Johnny Martin
Excuse me, but I have a question. When I type in the theme names in wordpress, they don’t quite appear.
WPBeginner Support
It would depend on which theme as not all are on the theme repository, you can visit the link in our article and use one of the other methods to install the theme from the guide here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-install-a-wordpress-theme/
Admin
Acha Mercy
thanks a lot for putting this up. this’s really helpful for a beginner like me.
WPBeginner Support
You’re welcome
Admin
James Anderson
Thanks so much I always learn something new from these tutorials
WPBeginner Support
Glad our tutorials can help
Admin
Connie
I expected to find themes for authors, not for selling books…
I am looking for themes with, let’s say,
– bibliography, could be a CPT
– multi-pages-content
– etc.
just author-related content..
WPBeginner Support
If you’re looking to list multiple authors bibliographies with that custom post type, you may want to take a look at creating a directory using: https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-directory-plugins-for-wordpress/
Admin
Glen Batchelor
I’m currently using wordpress.org, can I transfer to wordpress.com?
WPBeginner Support
If you wanted to you certainly could, WordPress.com’s site has a guide on how to transfer your site to them.
Admin
Matt Werner
Great article, but many of these themes must be uploaded to Wordpress, which means you must have a Business Wordpress account which costs $299.04. I found one the hard way.
WPBeginner Support
Hi Matt,
You are probably using WordPress.com. Please see our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
Admin
Jackie Trottmann
Thanks for the great article. I’ve been wanting to update my site for a long time. I purchased the Creativo theme after reading this, but I’m really concerned that it says it’s best to use on a new install. I have a demo site to play around with, but I need to install it on a site that has been around since 2009 with lots of content. Am starting to feel like I threw money away. Will this be possible to transfer the content to this new theme? I had been building my own sites with something called Artisteer, but I just know enough to be dangerous, not enough to figure all of this out. I’ve never had a problem changing the Artisteer theme and having my content just where it needs to be. When I uploaded this theme with existing content on my demo site, it was just code everywhere! Ugh! Thanks for any words of wisdom you can give!
WPBeginner Support
Hey Jackie,
It is easier to setup themes on a brand new website with no content. However, it would also work well for an existing website. You will have to follow the documentation to setup your theme. Basically, you will need to select a separate page for your blog posts and add your pages to navigation menus. Then you can move on to tweaking the homepage. Your theme also comes with support, so you can reach out to theme developer and they’ll be able to help you figure this out.
Good luck
Admin