Post 10 of 26 of The Self-Publishing Series
1. Books don’t have to be trapped inside themselves.
When you wrote a book you could add a footnote and expect few if any readers to look up your references. It was far too much work for most readers to follow the trail of the references. Today books are connected to the internet and authors should adjust accordingly. Whether it’s on a Kindle e-ink device or an iPhone using the iBooks or Kindle app our books now have the ability to connect themselves to other works.
2. If someone is reading your book then they’re likely to read another book that you endorse.
Since original ideas are hard to come by it’s likely your book is a compilation of other books that have influenced you. You can link to those other books now from within your book and your readers will thank you. They want to follow the trail of great content that helped you form your ideas and now you can lead the way by adding links inside your book.
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3. How to add the links
Creating a link inside your book using Scrivener, my writing program of choice, is as simple as navigating to Edit – Add Link… in the menu. You can even add affiliate and trackable links to see how many people click on the links inside your book. I use a WordPress plugin called “Pretty Links Lite” to create the links inside my books.
WARNING: Apple’s iBooks store can and will reject your book if you have links to Amazon.com inside your book. This happened to Seth Godin in his book Stop Stealing Dreams as detailed in this article.
This is why you can’t buy my book and likely any of my future books from Apple’s iBook store. It’s Apple’s store and they make their own rules for it but if I can’t have the links I want to have in my book then I’m going to pass on Apple’s iBook store for now. Apple had decided they’d rather have me give 30% of my profits to Amazon than allow me to link to Amazon.com inside my book.
Use links in your book to videos, other books and articles and use a tool like Pretty Links so you can track, brand and adjust those links in the future. Your reader will thank you.
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