The Author Desk is a free newsletter for nonfiction business authors, including coaches, consultants, speakers and fractional executives who want their book to bring in clients. Every 7 to 14 days, Elizabeth Javor takes one thing she checks on every book that comes to her desk and shows you how to check it on your own. She has worked in publishing and book marketing since 2007.
Somebody went looking for you at the back of your book
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THIS ISSUE You'd never know it happenedSomebody read your book last month, looked for the thing you offered at the back, and never found it. You have no idea it happened. There's no bounce report for a paperback. Three things go wrong back there. Here they are in the order they're most likely happening to you. The first one only exists in print. In Kindle, your link is live, and a reader taps it. On paper, it's a string of characters somebody has to copy out by hand onto a phone while holding the book open. Long URLs don't survive that. Neither do tracking links or anything with a hyphen. If you wrote your back matter once and used it in both editions, one version works, and the other doesn't. The second one shows up later. Websites get rebuilt, and free downloads get retired, but you can't edit a printed book after it ships. Every copy already out there keeps sending readers to a page that's gone, and nobody emails to tell you. The third one is the quietest, because the link works. It just lands somewhere useless. A homepage is the easiest destination to pick and the worst one to arrive on. Someone who finished your book shows up ready, and the page meets them with a menu built for strangers and the thing you wanted them to do three clicks down. Whatever you find in the ebook, you can fix this week. The print edition waits for the next printing, so you need to know now. What the link should point to depends on what you sell. A booking page suits a consultant with a short sales cycle. An email capture suits somebody whose buyers take months to decide. That one gets decided book by book. FROM THE INDUSTRY A free self-publishing conference runs this weekend ALLi's SelfPubCon is online on October 17 and 18 and it is free to everyone, not only members. Worth an hour if you have never heard the distribution and rights sessions argued by people who are not selling you anything. Alliance of Independent Authors You can now certify a book as human-written The Authors Guild opened its Human Authored mark to any author of a book published in the United States. It is free for members and $10 a title otherwise, and it certifies that the text was written by people. Using AI for research, brainstorming, outlining, a table of contents or an index does not disqualify a book, and nor does a spell checker. If a reader or a buyer has ever asked you whether you wrote your own book, this is the shortest answer. Authors Guild Best regards, Elizabeth Website · Substack · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook 600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246 You've elected to receive emails from The Book Marketing Source. Unsubscribe |
The Author Desk by The Book Marketing Source
The Author Desk is a free newsletter for nonfiction business authors, including coaches, consultants, speakers and fractional executives who want their book to bring in clients. Every 7 to 14 days, Elizabeth Javor takes one thing she checks on every book that comes to her desk and shows you how to check it on your own. She has worked in publishing and book marketing since 2007.
THIS ISSUE Your audiobook may already be in Kindle+ On October 22, Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+ and added audiobooks for subscribers in the US. Subscribers can now read a book, listen to it or do both at no extra cost. Listening is paid the same way reading is now, by page, out of the KDP Select Global Fund, and KDP says it's adding money to that fund to cover listening. Some audiobooks went in with no new action from their authors. If you made an audiobook with KDP's virtual...
THIS ISSUE Nobody can sell you a TEDx spot Somebody emails you about a TEDx talk. They know an organizer, a spot is opening up, and there's a fee that covers coaching and the stage. TED's own page on how TEDx speakers get chosen answers that offer directly. Go and find that email, and look for the number. TED's rules for the people who run these events say that TEDx events "may neither pay nor charge speakers." On its page for speakers, TED is blunter. Any fee-based "TEDx service" is...
THIS ISSUE Who sees your Featured section Open a private browser window, search for your own name, and click through to your LinkedIn profile. Look at what's there. Then sign in and look at the same profile again. The first time through, your Featured section is missing. LinkedIn's help pages say that to view someone's Featured content, "the viewer must have a LinkedIn account and must be logged in." Anyone who reads your profile without signing in won't see anything you've featured,...