I'm an author and am setting up a website for my new book. In choosing a domain name, I was thinking I should just get firstnamelastname.com

I could then use the homepage as kind of a general launchpoint for all kinds of projects I do and things related to me... so, in reality, the actual "homepage" for my book would end up being something like firstnamelastname.com/books/bookname

My question is this: assuming the coding on the actual page is the same, will I somehow end up with a lower ranking because the books homepage URL is not a top-level URL?

PS> you're probably thinking the the URL is too long, but I was going to get one of those free URL redirection service things to create a simple URL to point to the longer firstnamelastname.com/books/bookname - I would then just give out the easy URL in marketing efforts for the book.

Thanks for your thoughts

My question is this: assuming the coding on the actual page is the same, will I somehow end up with a lower ranking because the books homepage URL is not a top-level URL?
Not at all. And if you are going to have several books and you are known by name, you should very well have a firstnamelastname domain. Lots of authors and even music artists do this very thing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Parry is a great name. It's short and catchy and brandable. And simple enough to easily remember. Then there can be other things done with it in addition to the book - like a blog or journal, for example. Or maybe restaurant or book reviews - whatever is of high interest will make for great content. And the more great, unique content goes on the site the more some ODP editor will like the site eventually.

Domains are about $6.95 or $7.95 on sale now - take it anyway, even if you eventually only use it as a personal type of site - not a bad idea anyway, it's just another way to legitimately harvest Page Rank.

That's the domain I'd personally take for the site, without a moments hesitation. If people see the site, they may not remember the name of the book for typing in - but the single word name they will.

Added:
You can get keyword anchor text links for the site regardless of what the domain name is. Truly, I'd use the one word - great name for a site!