Need a little help, please...

[Gerald]

I am a newbie as a goodreads author and have discovered that even following the guidelines on posting a new book to my author's page that the link to send someone to a site where they can purchase it isn't working. I'd like to find out what I am doing wrong...please help


Gerald

[Cait]

Gerald, most of the purchase links work from the ISBN or ASIN fields. If your books are for sale through major booksellers such as Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes&Noble, or Kobo, you may have multiple editions of some books and you probably have an ISBN or ASIN for each edition.

* If you have a 10-digit ISBN, you can enter this in the ISBN field
* If you have a 13-digit ISBN, you can enter this in the ISBN-13 field
* If you have an ASIN, you can enter this in the ASIN field (there is a toggle next to the ISBN fields) instead of entering an ISBN, even if you also have an ISBN

On ISBNs:
* If you have a 13-digit number from Barnes&Noble which begins 294-, this is from their proprietary ISBN-13 sequence; you can enter this in the ISBN-13 field and leave the ISBN field blank
* If you have a 13-digit number from Kobo which begins 123-, this is from their proprietary ISBN-13 sequence; you can enter this in the ISBN-13 field and leave the ISBN field blank
* If you have a 10-digit ISBN and also a 13-digit ISBN which begins 978- and has the next 9 digits matching the beginning of the 10-digit number, you can enter the 10-digit ISBN in the ISBN field and the 13-digit ISBN in the ISBN-13 field; otherwise use only the ISBN field or the ISBN-13 field, not both

Does that help?

[Gerald]

Cait wrote: "Gerald, most of the purchase links work from the ISBN or ASIN fields. If your books are for sale through major booksellers such as Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes&Noble, or Kobo, you may have multiple e..."

Firstly, thank you for the speedy answer to my cry for help. Now to the bad part...I do publish through smashwords and therefor many other sites that they release my works to. In so saying, all of their ISBN numbers are 13 digits and I have checked to be sure that each of the books listed so far have the correct number in the isbn13 box.

Is there something else that might be prohibiting the link to work? I've noticed this on other author's books listed and just searched by name and/or author, but would really like to make it more convenient for potential readers, if you know what I mean.

Thanks again Cate for giving me a better insight of where to check.

[Cait]

It might be an issue with the buy links you're attempting to use, then. Each user can customize their own set of links, so the links you're using may not be the ones that other people are using. When I tried a couple of your books with the Smashwords buy link which I have set for myself, they all pulled up a book on the Smashwords site. Are there particular books which are not working for you?

[Gerald]

Cait, I just went through the current list, and it seems that some will pull up one or more sites, but only one will pull up B&N for some reason. As a nook owner I find that disheartening...sigh. Is there a way to put in their ISBN number as well as the smashwords one? Again I do thank you for you patient labors of helping a newbie out.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Gerald wrote: "only one will pull up B&N for some reason."

The reason is that B&N frequently uses their own pseudo-ISBNs, which begin 294-. There is no way for a single Goodreads book record to have both that and the Smashwords ISBN; you would need one edition with one, and one with the other. The different editions of the same book would then be combined, but the book links will only go to B&N when used on the correct edition.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

For example: https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...

[Gerald]

My thanks rivka, I really appreciate the assist. I will just have to do what I can to deal with the links the way they are for now.