Keeping Your Already-Published Ebooks up to Date

I’m doing a little housekeeping today (not actual housekeeping… I’m sure I can put that off for a few more weeks) and thought I’d do a quick post to remind other authors to do the same things once in a while.

I’m uploading a new version of Encrypted to Amazon, B&N, and other stores right now. I’ve updated the file to include a list of all the work I have out to date, and I’ve also include a first-chapter preview of my recently published Decrypted.

Encrypted was the second novel I published, and I realized I didn’t mention any of my other work at the end (probably because there wasn’t much of it available at the time!). That was fine back in early 2011, but now I have seven novels out, with some people stumbling across Encrypted as an introduction into my world. If they like it, sure, they can check the store to see what else I’ve published, but I think it’s a good idea to let the readers know there’s more right when they finish the book. That’s taken care of now, and I plan on going back and updating my Emperor’s Edge books in a similar fashion once I’ve published the last one in the series. I’ll probably change the afterwords, then, too, as many of them were targeted at folks who picked up the book right after it was published (for example, at the end of Book 4, I have an apology about the cliffhanger nature of the ending — at the time 5 wasn’t available, so readers were left, er, hanging).

In addition to tinkering with the afterwords and book lists, I’m changing the pricing for the international stores (i.e. Amazon UK, CA, DE, etc.). I’d just been letting the stores automatically set the prices for other countries based on my U.S. price. Well, I had a short email exchange with Mark Lefebvre, Director of Self Publishing and Author Relations at Kobo, and he mentioned that their Canadian Merchandiser likes to see (and might even give preference to, insofar as showcasing indies goes) books with normal looking prices (i.e. $4.99 instead of $4.92). Well, I’m all about being in a position to be showcased!

On the assumption that this may be true in other markets, I’m going to gradually go in and change all of my books to have *99 or *95 price tags in the international stores (this won’t be possible for the titles distributed through Smashwords, but with Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble UK, it is).

Lastly, I’m going through my website to update the static pages (“book news” and my list of  novels, novellas, and short stories specifically), ensuring they mention my latest publications and have links to excerpts when applicable.

So, in addition to getting back to work on EE6, I’ll be working on these housekeeping tidbits this week. They’re things that are easy to forget about when you start to have a larger number of ebooks out there, but it’s good to remember that you have new readers finding you all the time, and they’ll be wondering about all of your older titles as well as reading orders.

Related Posts:

My Experience Advertising My Ebook with BookBub
How Do You Maintain Steady Book Sales at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.?
Ebook Pricing Strategy for a Stand Alone Novel?