It’s all about branding and centralization! A domain and website in your name provides a common point that can follow you along your writing career, Almost every politician, actress, actor, musician, artist and author has a website in their own name! Shouldn’t you have one too?
Social media is a necessary evil in the popularity and promotions game, but there is a growing segment of the population that goes out of their way to avoid using social media, which sadly has devolved into a cesspool of faked accounts, fake news, advertisements and/or bots. Plus, any of them could quickly fade into obscurity if something new comes along. Remember MySpace? It was once the most popular site on the Internet and then it suddenly died, it’s still around, but a mere shadow of its former self… and there’s numerous other examples I could list.
A website with a domain name in your author name is yours for as long as you keep it. It becomes the central hub for EVERYTHING you want the public to know about. By all means continue to use social media, but always point them back to your website as being the source for everything! Make a post on your website and then share that to all your social media accounts.
You don’t need to make it complicated, it can be as simple as here’s my book and here’s where you can buy it. Of course, when you do get famous and people start asking you to participate on panels and make appearances, it becomes your soapbox to speak to your fans, free of all the constraints imposed by sites controlled by other people.