One of the disadvantages of selling my novels via my webpage, or by allowing people to buy them via Amazon or B&N online or any of the other on-line webstores is that people have a long history of picking up a book, and reading a few pages to get the feel for the book. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been sending my books to the Google Books site as they are published. I was also pleased that the Kindle store is set up to send a few pages as a sample for free. But one of the gaps in this process was my own home grown website.
So, this morning, I made partials from the PDFs that I had sent to Lightning Source as the masters for the printing process. I skipped over to page 50 in the text and then advanced a few pages until I reached a chapter end and then chopped off the PDF at that point, just adding a button that would get a reader back to my webstore using the advanced editing functions of Adobe Acrobat.
I added a download link on each of the novel’s ‘official’ pages and may do the same on the webstore itself. I have no idea if this will help, but just as people buying the Kindle versions of my books have the opportunity to browse sample pages, this rounds out the process for the trade paperbacks.
If you’re interested, just go to my website home page and click on the covers half way down the page.