You shouldn’t have more items than fit on one line. If your menu breaks into 3 lines because you have 27 items in it, it will look like crap and be confusing.
Choose your main categories and put the other pages as submenus, usually that dropdown when the mouse cursor is over the menu.
Your main pages should be:
- Home
- About
- Books
- Reviews
- Store/Buy (I put these under books rather than adding a separate page).
- Contact (or this can go under “about”)
Other items may be,
blog, events, news, reviews, public appearances, awards… but if those don’t have a lot of content, you could put most of them on your “About” page rather than making them jump around to different pages.
Keep things as simple as possible.
You may have to make tough choices in deciding what to display or not. I don’t think you should have more than six items on your menu at any time, so you have to think about how your organize things.
You can also determine the flow of traffic. Where do you want them to go first.
What do you want to show them next.
Figure it out.
Remove all the menu headers except a few – you could even add a “start here” page, and after they read that say “now you can read and excerpt, buy the book on amazon, sign up for my list or follow me on Facebook” with links to all those choices (although, that’s probably too many chance).
Focus on one main action and make it the biggest, easiest choice.
