How I Finally Built a Website Where My Books Could Live

For a long time, my website looked a little like an apartment in the middle of a move, when everything you own is technically somewhere in the room, but the things you actually need have disappeared into boxes, the books are stacked on chairs, there is one cup you keep using because finding the others would require opening six cartons, and every new attempt to put things in order somehow creates another pile in the corner. That was more or less what happened here. The site began with my legal work, then life moved to Tbilisi, relocation became part of everyday reality, there were consultations, property, new projects, books, free chapters, a blog, old pages that still seemed useful, newer pages that seemed even more useful, and eventually several perfectly genuine versions of me were living on the same homepage and politely getting in one another's way.

None of those versions was invented, which was exactly why it took me so long to simplify anything. I have more than twenty years of legal practice in St Petersburg, so of course the legal part belonged there. Then Georgia became part of my life, and for a while it made sense to write about relocation, property and the very practical questions people have when they're trying to organise a life in another country. Then the books became more important, and naturally I added those too. A website is wonderfully accommodating in that way. It rarely tells you that you've put too much into it. It simply keeps accepting one more page in much the same way that a person accepts one more chocolate with the firm belief that this one definitely doesn't count.

Eventually, though, someone arriving on the homepage for the first time needed far too much patience to understand what the site was actually about. I'd reached the point where a visitor almost had to conduct a small private investigation before deciding whether they'd found a writer, a lawyer, a relocation consultant, a person talking about Tbilisi, or some rather ambitious combination of all four. So consultations on Russian law now have a separate home on Olga Sverchkova's legal website, while this site has finally been allowed to do something much simpler: become a home for my books.

At some point, a website has to decide what matters most

The strange thing about having your own website is that it constantly invites you to add things. There is always room for another page, another block, another menu item, another explanation of who you are and what you do, and because there is technically no physical wall telling you to stop, it is very easy to end up with a site that contains everything except a clear answer to the most basic question. I could have kept adding to it indefinitely. Another section about services, another old project I wasn't quite ready to remove, another useful page, another paragraph explaining how one part of my life connected to another. At some point I might even have ended up offering interior designers consultations on the correct emotional shade of beige, simply because there was still an empty space in the menu.

What finally helped was asking a much less complicated question: if somebody found this site today and knew nothing about me, what would I actually want them to see first? The answer was obvious enough to make me slightly annoyed that it had taken so long to arrive at it. I wanted them to see the books. Not after reading an explanation of my professional history, not after working through several unrelated services, and not tucked somewhere between things that had once been central to my life but no longer needed to sit at the top of the page. An old version of yourself can be completely real and still not deserve the first screen forever.

That doesn't mean the old life disappears. It becomes context rather than the headline, which is probably what happens with most things if you live long enough. I still carry more than twenty years of legal practice into the way I look at people, arguments, memory, motives and the stories we tell when we need our own version of events to make sense. I still live in Tbilisi and notice the city in all the ordinary ways that eventually become material. I still understand what it means to move countries and discover that a large life decision is mostly made up of very small practical ones. All of that remains part of the writing, but it no longer needs a separate sales block on the homepage in order to be true.

The books finally have room to breathe

The first book that made this especially obvious was Nobody Told Me About Tbilisi. I hadn't arrived in Georgia intending to turn the city into a book. I came here to live, and because living somewhere is much less elegant than writing about it afterwards, what I noticed first were ordinary things: taxi drivers, neighbours, courtyards, balconies, dogs, traffic, conversations in shops, strange little misunderstandings, familiar routes, and all the daily details that eventually teach you more about a city than a list of landmarks ever could. I kept collecting them without really deciding to, and at some point those fragments became stories, while the stories quietly turned into a book.

The Alibi of St. Petersburg comes from a completely different relationship with a city, because St Petersburg isn't somewhere I discovered as an adult. I was born and raised there, and when you've known a place from the inside for most of your life, you don't look at it in the same way. The streets are mixed with memory, certain buildings belong to particular periods of your life, a familiar route can contain twenty years at once, and the city stops being a background long before you notice that this has happened. That book grew from the part of St Petersburg that is beautiful, private, unsettling and sometimes impossible to separate from the people who have lived there.

Then there is Petersburg. It's Normal., which comes from the same city but from a much less solemn angle, because St Petersburg also has a special talent for producing situations that would seem improbable almost anywhere else and entirely routine there. If you've lived in the city long enough, you eventually stop asking why something is happening and simply accept that apparently this is today's version of normal. That tone needed its own book because affection for a place isn't always expressed through nostalgia. Sometimes it is expressed through the ability to recognise its absurdity and love it anyway.

And then there is The Life Between Staying and Leaving, where the city steps back and relationships move forward. That book is interested in the things that make up adult love once romance has had to share the room with money, sex, fatigue, resentment, tenderness, responsibility, habit, fear and the endless practical negotiations of ordinary life. Relationships rarely collapse because of one beautifully dramatic scene. More often they change by degrees, through small disappointments, old arguments, unspoken expectations and the uncomfortable question of whether two people are still together because they choose each other or because leaving would require even more courage.

These books don't belong to the same genre, tone or emotional landscape, and that is exactly why I needed a site that could hold them together without pretending they were variations of the same thing. A book page should give each of them enough space to sound like itself.

I didn't want a catalogue

I never wanted the site to become a neat row of covers with Buy buttons underneath, because that tells you almost nothing about whether you actually want to spend several evenings with a book. A cover matters, of course, and so does a description, but neither can replace the simple experience of opening the text and discovering whether the voice makes you want to keep going. That is why free chapters became an important part of the site. I'd much rather someone read twenty pages, decide the book isn't for them and leave honestly than buy it because a sales paragraph worked harder than the text itself.

Some books now have free chapters, and I want that part of the site to keep growing. The point isn't to turn reading into a funnel with carefully calculated buttons at every stage. The point is to make the decision easy and ordinary. You can arrive here without knowing me, open a chapter, read for a while and decide for yourself. If you want the rest of the book, it is there. If you don't, no tragedy has occurred, and nobody needs to chase you across the internet with a reminder that you once looked at page three.

I also wanted each book page to contain more than the kind of description that fits on a shop page. There should be room for the atmosphere of the book, the story behind it, free excerpts where they make sense, and the details that usually get removed because they aren't efficient enough for a product description. Books aren't efficient objects. That is part of their appeal.

The blog is where the rest of life goes

Not every idea needs to become a book, which is fortunate because I already have enough half-written things without turning every thought into a three-hundred-page commitment. The blog gives me somewhere to put the texts that begin with something smaller: a conversation in Tbilisi, a memory of St Petersburg, an argument about relationships, a thought about money, a strange everyday scene, a person I met once, a house, a road, a dog doing something completely unrelated to the subject and somehow ending up in the story anyway.

I like writing this way because a column can stay close to the moment that produced it. A book usually demands distance, structure and the slightly unreasonable belief that you will still care about the same material many months later. A blog post can begin because something irritated me yesterday and become, several paragraphs later, a text about something I hadn't realised I was thinking about at all. That looseness matters to me, and I wanted the site to leave room for it rather than treat the blog as an obligatory section that exists mainly because websites are apparently supposed to have one.

The blog also connects the books to the life around them. Tbilisi doesn't stop existing when a manuscript is finished, St Petersburg doesn't disappear because one book has already used it, and relationships certainly don't become less complicated because you've written a novel about them. Some subjects keep returning because life keeps returning to them.

Rebuilding the site turned out to be a form of editing

The part I didn't expect was how much rebuilding a website would resemble editing a manuscript. Adding things is easy. Removing them is where the real work begins, because a page can be useful and still no longer belong, just as a sentence can be perfectly good and still weaken the paragraph around it. I kept finding old sections that were accurate, competent and completely wrong for the site I was trying to build now, and once I started seeing them that way, deleting them became much easier.

The legal work moved to its own site. The books came forward. The free chapters became easier to find. The blog stopped competing with half a dozen unrelated directions. The biography became shorter because it no longer had to account for every professional version of me before allowing the reader to reach the present. The homepage stopped behaving like a person who has been asked what they do and, instead of answering, begins explaining the last twenty-five years in chronological order.

This was probably the most useful part of the whole process. A website doesn't have to preserve every former version of you at equal volume simply because each one was once important. Editing isn't the denial of what came before. It is deciding what the reader needs now.

I wanted the site to feel like me

I didn't want it to feel like a publishing company, an online shop or a legal directory, and certainly not like a polished personal brand created by people who have never met the person whose name is on the screen. I wanted it to feel lived in, because that is how I write and, frankly, that is how I live. There are books here, but there are also cities, ordinary routines, past professions, houses, arguments, memory, dogs, practical problems, bad timing, good sentences and the occasional thing that refuses to fit neatly into whichever category I had prepared for it.

A writer's site doesn't need to pretend that the writer only exists while producing books. Most of the interesting material happens while you're doing something else entirely. You drive somewhere, overhear something, remember the wrong person at the wrong moment, argue about money, notice a building you've passed a hundred times, lose half a day to an absurd practical problem, and then much later realise that the thing you thought was an interruption was actually the beginning of a text.

That was the atmosphere I wanted to keep. Not a showroom, but a place where the books belong to a larger life without being buried underneath it.

So this is what the website is now

It is a home for my books, with separate pages for each of them, free chapters where they are available, new writing in the blog and enough information about me to explain whose site this is without turning the homepage into a professional autobiography. The legal work has its own place now, which is better for that site and better for this one, because neither has to pretend to be something broader than it actually is.

I don't expect this version to remain untouched forever. That would be suspicious. There will be new books, old pages will move, something will eventually annoy me enough to rewrite it late at night, and at some point I'll almost certainly discover that a button I was perfectly happy with for six months has suddenly become intolerable. Websites are like houses in that respect. The moment you finish one room, you start looking critically at another.

But now, when I open the homepage, I understand immediately what belongs there and why. I don't feel the need to explain every previous version of myself before anyone is allowed to start reading.

The books are already there.

Start with the books

If this is your first time on my website, the easiest place to begin is with the books. Choose the one that feels closest to your mood, or start with the free chapters and see whether you want to keep reading.

My Books

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Author Olga Sverchkova

I’m a writer. Before that, I spent more than twenty years practising law in St Petersburg. I have lived in Tbilisi since 2023 and write about people, cities, relationships and everyday life.

ABOUT ME