Quote:
Originally Posted by Dusky Rose
I'll third that. It's one of my top-listed series. Just under the Dresden Files.
As for Samhain, I had gotten some freebies and bought a few from them in the remote past, and didn't like the web site. So basically forgot about them.
With the sale, I ended up getting 13 books. But I felt I had to work hard to find them and just became annoyed at trying to find m/m books. I ran across one by accident, (The only clue being the cover of a series I'd read) and then hit the tags inside to bring up more. I found it hard to find series information, and some books were catagorised GLBT but not tagged that way.
I see the books have multiple tags, but never figured out how to chose more than one tag at a time. So that led to a lot of back-n-forth.
Reminded me why I didn't come back to their site after my first few experiences.
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A working and easy-to-use site is very important. I know I've lost sales on my own site when it wasn't working (glitches). Readers almost never report they had a problem--they just move on (I'm not blaming them). My site had an issue for 2 months. I saw visitors and wasn't seeing downloads. I finally got suspicious and tested it again. Yup. There had been an update to the cart software and since I hadn't implemented it, the whole thing was failing. No one, out of probably 30 readers, reported it. I DO test the thing, but didn't know about the new software because that particular software doesn't have a flag/email.
This is not to excuse any site, but it is an ongoing effort and I think a lot of "self-retailers" give up because the sales are actually small compared to other retailers, like Amazon. In my consulting business, I get asked all the time if it is a good idea for an author to have their own store--the answer is usually "no" unless the author can handle the design and technical upgrades on their own because to pay someone would NOT pay for itself in book sales (For most authors). I suspect that has been the case even for a small publishers (which is part of the reason Baen had to start putting books on Amazon)--HOWEVER, I do think that is changing, slowly. I do think readers will buy from individual retailers more often now than in the past. Whether that is a "growth" opportunity or not, remains to be seen.