Backstage with the Twins – Adjusting to Amazon & the renumbering of the DoB series

Backstage with the Twins – Adjusting to Amazon & the renumbering of the DoB series

 

Amazon is always making changes to their sight. Changing and improving on how books are displayed and how readers can find them. So its important Authors do the same. Regardless of your thoughts on Amazon they are in fact the largest retailer of books and if you want your books to reach your readers you sell on Amazon. What’s important is keeping up. Amazon gives authors more control over their product page than any other retailer around, yet many authors don’t use it to their advantage. Consider your product page the window display to your store. Amazon gives you the chance to dress it up and I’m here to say… you should!!  It also requires some regular maintenance. Sometimes when the wide spread rearrangements take place a book or two might get dropped from your author listings. Such as the case for us, finding just today that Quantum Mates: What Torin Wants was no longer showing up under Talon’s author page. An easy fix, but would have remained absent if we didn’t make regardless house calls.  Another reason to always make checks is sometimes our blurb and details can get jammed together. and don’t check just the kindle page, check your paperback edition, and refresh your pages regularly. Now on to what’s new!

One of the newest gadget added is the series display widget on the product page of books listed as  part of a series and I have to say its an attrative feature.

Going from this

 

to this…

 

This also makes it much easier to promote your series. But one thing you might have to take a look at is how you number your books. For us, The Dominion of Brothers series presently has 6 books out, but in way of the title numbers one of the books is listed as 1.5 so when viewing the series on Amazon there appears to only be 5. Amazon’s listings doesn’t allow for so called ‘.5 ‘ books and the results is such book are left out of the series listings. For us it meant Domming the Heiress doesn’t show up and the results has hurt the books over all sales. Readers don’t always know to look for it. We had spoken with Amazon several times over this and at one point we did have the book connected to the series link but without a title number. Now, with the new look Domming the Heiress has been dropped. But there is a way to get around it and that is to simply change the listing number in Amazon. This doesn’t have to change the book. DtH is still book 1.5 in the DoB series, but from now on will be listed as book 2 on Amazon, so that it will finally be included in the series display.

Readers can click on the link to the left of the display which will take them to the series product page, it lets them see which books in that series they have already purchased and down at the bottom they can leave a review for the series all together. Pretty nifty.

 

Another super cool thing Amazon has it a Book Preview widget you can use to embed right into your own website, so that readers can preview your book without having to be redirected to another site called Kindle Instant Book Previews. With a few options available, you can use either the resizable embed codes or use the url code to get one of these!!

 

 

 

The only glitch I am seeing so far on these is the limit of browser support, but hopefully other browsers will get on board with this. Still, its a nice bell and whistle to impress blog visitors. Well now that I’ve just dumped a bunch of homework in your lap, I think I’ll stop there.

 

HAPPY WRITING!!!