Lessons Learned - Why You Need Links in Your E-Book

A few weeks ago, I picked up Tatooine Ghost as a Kindle Daily Deal. I used to inhale Star Wars novels like cocaine before GK was born. So needless to say, this novel was one of many released during the 21st century that I haven't read.

Honestly, I can say this is one of the better conversions I've seen of a novel that was originally in hardcover. I only noticed one typo. So kudos to Random House for one small grace. Plus, there was a short story starring Chewie, his wife and son. *grin*

But there were some other things that really annoyed me, and this comes under the list of "if you're indie, you probably shouldn't do this":

1) Over half of the file were samples for other Star Wars books. Seriously only 48% of the damn file was the actually novel. One or two samples I could have dealt with, but I lost count of the number of single chapters from separate novels. I felt cheated, even though I know I really wasn't.

2) There were no links to ANY of the e-books that were sampled, much less links to the zillion other Star Wars novels mentioned after the end of Tatooine Ghost. In fact, one of the sample chapters I read involved Leia, Mara and Jaina. I would have downloaded it right then if there was a 'Buy Now' link. But there wasn't.

And I've already forgotten the title of the story.

And I'm in the middle of NaNo, so I probably won't remember to look up the story in December.

See how Random House just lost a sale?

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I understand if you're going through a distributor, direct links can be a major no-no. But if you're uploading your books directly to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, etc., you have no reason not to have the links for those particular stores for all of your books. (And you should ALWAYS have a "Additional Books by" section at the end of your e-book!)

For those of you using a central distributor and you can't add specific buy links to your e-book files, make sure you have a link to your website where you have...wait for it...buy links to all the online stores that carry your books!

This is a simple little solution to not lose a sale.

Have I always done this? No. I'm going through my early releases and rectifying this little problem. It means a separate file and conversion for each store, and it's a bit of a pain, but I know the end result will be soooo worth it!