Self Publishing Today

I’ve written before about the power of Google Book Search for authors and the self publishing industry as a whole. I think it’s an amazing service and never really understood the complaints… but, that’s not the point of the post.

This is all about the new goodies for Google Book Search that Google unveiled on the blog – and I think there are some amazing ones that can help indie authors grow their book sales. Every self publishing company should be including Google Book Search in their service offerings (some, like Dog Ear Publishing, offer Google Book Search as part of  all self publishing packages). Doesn’t add too much to a WordPress.com hosted blog – but if you have a site or Blogger account – check out the Preview Wizard to create some cool code – check it out on my A Day in the Life of a Dog blog.

1. Embeds and links – how completely cool is this? Check out the embedded reference to a Tour de France book over here at Blogger … (though it seems to work much more easily in Blogger than here in WordPress) Think how you could direct traffic to your book via your blog, site, etc
2. Improvement for search – to me the search feature for content in the book was already pretty good. Now it even tells you the exact page.
3. Thumbnail view - of all the pages available for preview.
4. Contents drop-down menu – There is now a table-of-contents drop down that lets you to navigate to chapters within the book.
5. Page Turn Button and Animation – I’m not sure this qualifies as anything other than a ‘hmm, that’s nice…’ (because I can’t really see any way it matters unless you are using an e-book) but you can now click a little icon to turn the page, it’s animated, and it has a track bar to show your  relative location within the book.
6. Improved Book Overview Page – Another very cool feature – on your overview page there is now more data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc. This is a good place to see exactly what Google is seeing about your book…