I’m starting to feel sorry for my books. They’ve been battered in the last few months. I tore them off comfy shelves, reformatted them to make them look all pretty, gave them new ISBNs, placed them nicely back on the lovely shelves of Pronoun, a book distributor, only to have that bookcase come crashing to the ground.
Just a few months after moving everything and loving it there (seriously, it was great!), Pronoun announced they are closing their doors in January. So the process had to start all over again. I debated going back to Smashwords for all distribution, but their system is clunky and not user-friendly at all. So, yesterday I moved everything I could over to the individual stores I could (B&N and Kobo) and will use Draft2Digital as my distributor. I’ll now only use Smashwords to get to a few bookstores I can’t get my books in any other way and have my books there for direct sales, which gets me a higher royalty.
That was a lot of info in a very small space. What does it really mean? Well, that my books are going to have different URLs, so old URLs won’t work. Links will be broken until I can get everything up and running again. It also means my books may be in different stores than before.
And that brings me to Books2Read. It’s a book landing page with store links, something I tried to make my portfolio. All links in the backmatter of my ebooks land on my portfolio pages. Well, Books2Read does that too but with a wider range of stores. Here’s a sample; this one is for Spark, and as you can see, it’s available at several stores.
Apparently if readers click on their fave store (say you always buy your books at Kobo), every time you use a B2R link, it will take you to your preferred store. I have the option of putting this in the backmatter of ebooks as well, though I didn’t do that yesterday while uploading Naked Origins, Farm Fresh, Picked Fresh, or Silver Scars.
And there’s also an option of including a sign up to follow an author page to get notified of new releases, again with a preferred store. I’m not sure how I feel about that considering some books are released exclusively on Amazon to take advantage of KU’s boost on the charts, which translates to visibility and, therefore, more sales. So readers being forced to pick only one store won’t know a book has been released—unless that store is Amazon—until it goes wide. That may work for some, but not all.
I’d still rather readers sign up for my newsletter. 😉
I only wish they’d create an author landing page and the ability to put up some of the book details as well.
Do any of you already take advantage of these Book2Read features? How do they work for you? Do you like having the option of signing up for notifications? Do you like seeing all the stores in one spot?
