I’ve probably mentioned Joe Konrath and his blog A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing before. I wish I could claim to be in some way a friend to this dude, but I’m just a distant admirer. Seriously, the information Joe provides is incredibly helpful. If he’s not on your radar, click the link above and I’m willing to bet you’ll be an admirer, too.
His most recent post is Your Second Storefront. Please, you must go there, because I really want to have a dialogue about these ideas! He’s talking about how to make your ebook a better marketing tool, as people shift to browsing through the ebooks they’ve already purchased.
I’m already in this situation personally. The list of indie fantasy books I want to read is growing exponentially, and when I’m really interested, I buy. So I have a bunch of books on my iPad that I haven’t gotten to, and I have to admit that some may never make the top of my to-read list.
So, one of Joe’s solutions is to place the description that appears on the product page at the very beginning of the ebook, so when buyers go back through their books and decide what they’ll read next, your description is easy to find. Also, he suggests adding excerpts from other books — your books as well as other authors’ excerpts when you feel your readers would be interested. These are great ideas, and Joe states them better than I have, so please go read his blog. And then let me know what you think.
I don’t have an e-reader, so I’m not clear on some of the things he’s talking about, although I like the concept. Also, yeah, moving the copyright page to the end makes a lot of sense. It’s like having the credits at the end of the movie instead of the beginning.
The same can be said of print books. Have you ever gone on a book binge and bought way more than you could possibly consume, then felt a few weeks later like you had nothing to read? (Is that just me?) It’s like as soon as you bring that pile of books home the ones on the bottom of the stack disappear into the woodwork and you forget about them. Except it’s worse with ebooks, because with a print book when you go to your bookshelf you have the description (the back cover) right at your fingertips. Lots of ebooks just dive straight into the text — there’s no obvious place in an ebook for what’s traditionally gone on the back cover of a print book. That’s a big problem if people buy your ebook among many, and then it gets lost on their ereader.
Konrath is one of the smartest authors I know. This post makes so much sense, and he mentioned things I hadn’t even thought about. It should have been a no brainer to put your description at the beginning, but my brain didn’t figure that out. LOL
Btw, Konrath isn’t only smart, he’s an excellent writer. I love his books and I have my 22 year old son hooked on them, too. :0)
I’d been thinking similar things about placing excerpts from my books and other similar indie books at the end. In fact, I’ve also thought about adding links to great indie music (go Portland!). But I hadn’t thought about the description, either!
Thanks for commenting, Lauralynn. I’m in the middle of your recent release Dark Relic: Vampires’ Curse, and really enjoying your heroine, Libby Fox. And that brings up the reason I have yet to pick up a Konrath book — I’m finding so much I want to read within the fantasy and paranormal genres (my faves) that I haven’t branched out yet to other genres. I’ll get there, but at the moment I have a backlog of ebooks to read. 🙂