Self Publishing, Google Book Search, Google PPC

I just received our Google Book Search Weekly Summary Report – and I know I’ve covered Google Book Search before – but am consistently amazed at the power of this system to drive book sales.

Google Book Search Weekly Report for Dog Ear Publishing

Google Book Search Weekly Report for Dog Ear Publishing

We’ve (at Dog Ear Publishing – my self publishing company) been focusing more effort on the Google Book Search system for our self published authors. And it’s paying off… All the information above is proprietary – but it’s so astounding that I wanted to share at least portions of it with you.

Over 17,000 visits were made to our books’ pages on Google during July – and that’s for only 365 titles (not our total title count, but the total number of titles viewed in GB). Nearly 2.5% of those visits resulted in “buy links” being clicked. For most search-engine based book marketing efforts (or any book marketing effort for that matter) a 2.5% purchase response would be amazing – interestingly many of the top titles in GBS are also participating in some form of search engine marketing / pay-per-click book marketing / Google Adwords marketing at Dog Ear Publishing. My current findings are that the Google Book Search system is delivering a much higher purchase response than our search marketing campaigns – though the traffic is much smaller… It seems that perhaps the two items may work hand-in-hand at driving traffic and sales.

In any case – if you aren’t participating in Google Book Search, you should be. I realize many authors have deeply rooted concerns about copyright – but read the previous articles about Google Book Search and content view control. Hopefully you fears can be allayed – and you may realize increased book sales.

Google Book Search – new features for the self published author

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…

Google Book Search is revolutionizing self-publishing book sales

Google Book Search

I just finished reviewing calendar year-end sales numbers for our authors – and I’m stunned by what I’ve found attributable to Google Book Search. Authors involved in Google Book Search – all authors have this option – had sales far above the authors who chose NOT to have their books included. It’s free to participate – and I can’t possibly envision why any author self publishing their book wouldn’t want to be involved. Yes, some content is available to read online – but hey, if someone is willing to read your book 20% at a time, online, and screen-print it… well, they aren’t a book purchaser anyway.

This blog isn’t about Dog Ear Publishing - though it’s the company I own – it’s about self-publishing industry best-practices, and Google Book Search is one of them. Check out an article on my site that discusses why it’s important, especially for self-published authors of targeted product.

Here’s the link to the Google author pages themselves – and an inside look at the Google Book Search team can be found on the official blog, though the value of the blog has diminished and now contains recipes for holiday meals… not sure what that means.

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