Author: Linda

How does publishing my second book compare to the first?

Weeellll. When my first book, Perfectly Honest, went live, there were things I was very excited to do. Like buy it! First thing in the morning (before saying good morning to my son), I went onto amazon.com, fingers shaking I was so thrilled to be downloading MY book. I found the title, admired the cover (again), reread the blurb (even though I knew it by heart) and then scrolled over to the buy section. The buy section. Where was the buy section? I looked up, scrolled down, maybe they hid it on the left, no it looked like it should be on the right. WHERE WAS THE BUY BUTTON? Finally, I had to text my friend and she sent me a screen shot of the buy button right where it should be. Well, it turns out that when you live in Canada you have to be logged into amazon.ca to buy anything. I was on amazon.com – a different company – and hence no buy buttons for Canadians.

Okay, so I got that sorted out. Now I needed to gift my book to the winners of the draw I had held. I Googled how to do it – very simple, you click on the ‘Give as a gift’ button. Except the screen shot in Google did not look my screen in amazon.ca. WHERE WAS THE ‘GIVE AS A GIFT’ BUTTON? Well, it turns out (after a very nice online chat with the amazon helpers) that you cannot gift from amazon.ca. You have to be in amazon.com.

By then it was lunchtime and I had accomplished 2 things – I bought my book and figured out how to give it as a gift. I was also told it was very important to add a ‘buy link’ to my website and email it to the authors who were kindly hosting me on their blogs and sharing the good news! Only one problem – WHERE WAS THE BUY LINK? I had no idea what a ‘buy link’ was and although I didn’t mind admiring the amazon screen for another hour, I had no idea where to look for it. I was very grateful when a fellow Soul Mate Publishing author tweeted about my release and included a buy link. I copied and pasted it off her tweet.

The second time around, when Perfectly Reasonable was released, was much faster. I had all 3 things done by 7:15 a.m. That was probably the biggest difference.

When Perfectly Honest was published, I also had to set up accounts in amazon author central to ‘claim’ my book (that kept me busy until dinnertime), Goodreads (patience little grasshopper, the librarians will send an email when they verify you exist . . . and then send you another email when they remove the books by authors who share your name but who aren’t you), authorsDB (you are now indexed on Google – I had no idea what that meant, but yeah!), The Romance Reviews (wait for it) and Night Owl Reviews (it says ‘click here to set up an account’ but they’re only kidding – the publisher has to initiate it). Adding the second book was relatively quick because the accounts were already set up.

Overall, I’d have to say publishing the second book was easier (OMG sooooo much easier) – and I now know where to find the buy link! 😀