Finding You

Surely, I’m not the only one who does this, but when someone comments on a blog and mentions they have a book, I have a tendency to go looking for their book. I may not buy the book, but I may look for it to see what it’s about. Sadly, it is often harder than you might think. If I go directly to Amazon.com and type in the author’s name, I have pretty good luck most of the time, but sometimes that comes up with nothing. Sometimes I can follow the link back to the person’s blog or website, but you’d be surprised how many authors don’t provide links to their books on their websites. I sometimes resort to Google and even that yields results that are less than desirable. It’s no wonder they aren’t selling books, no one can find their books.

While it won’t guarantee book sales, one thing that we need to do is to make sure that people have easy access to our books. The more times people to click before reaching the product page for a book, the fewer people who will click through to the product page. We lose a few people with each click. You can see links to my books on the right-hand side of the page. Some of you have clicked through and purchased books. Thank you. Some of you have clicked through and decided that you wouldn’t read one of my books in a million years. If you’re one of those people, I’d rather not hear about it, but at least you were able to decide whether you wanted to buy the book or not. No author can claim to sell books to most people, but if people can’t find the authors book, even the people who would’ve purchased the book will choose not to do so.

So here’s what I suggest: imagine you know nothing of your book and you happen to see your name mentioned somewhere. What would you do to find your book? If you aren’t sure, find the book of some other unknown author and then use the same approach with your own name. How many clicks does it take to reach the book product page? Is it so many that you would’ve given up on your sudden urge to find out about the book? If it is, you need to work on it. You should be able to type your name into Amazon.com and within a couple of clicks get to the product page of a book you have written. You should be able to Google your name, find your website and from there find a product page that will allow you to purchase the book. If you follow the link from comments you leave on blogs, you should be able to find such a page very quickly. If you don’t, you can’t expect people to find your book, much less purchase it.