Hyperlinks Help Readers Discover Books

NOTE:  In January 2018, an updated and expanded edition of The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide was released, offering 65 book marketing ideas and new "Deep Dives" sections exploring social media strategy, how to work with beta readers, and how to earn free press coverage. 

To download the new Smashwords Book Marketing Guide for free, here are the coordinates:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iBooks
Kobo
Smashwords

The new 2018 edition of The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide is also available as a serialized podcast on the SMART AUTHOR podcast, starting with Episode 10.

Click here to access all SMART AUTHOR podcast episodes.






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The information that follows on this page is from the 2013 edition of the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, which will remain here for historical purposes only.


In the old days, one advantage of getting your book “traditionally” published was broad distribution into physical bookstores, where you hoped book buyers would stumble upon your book, read a few pages and purchase it.  In the realm of digital books, distribution remains critically important but shares similar importance with a characteristic that is unique to digital media:  the hyperlink. A hyperlink is the path your web browser takes to reach a certain destination.  It’s the web address for everything you find on the Internet.  Hyperlinks create the signposts, paths, roads and bridges that help your readers discover your book, even if your book was not the original destination they had in mind. 

Prospective readers may go to Google and do a search on “how to plant tulips,” and if that’s the book you’ve written they’re more likely to find you if you created the paths to your book.  Every time you or your fans publish a hyperlink on the Internet that points to your Smashwords author profile or your book page, that hyperlink makes your book more findable by the billions of people on the Internet.  Many of the tips provided in this guide are focused on how you can leverage the tools of the Internet to build the digital paths that lead readers to your doorstep.

When you publish hyperlinks on your blog or website, you can link directly to your book pages at Smashwords or any other retail platform.  Make it easy for your readers to read your work!

Some authors who already have personal web pages may wonder why they should work to build paths to their retail pages when they should be building paths to their own web pages.  Great question!  You should work to build paths to both pages, and to the extent you’re successful building paths to your Smashwords pages or other retailer pages, you’ll also assist your search engine optimization efforts for your personal standalone web site.  Here’s why:  Search engines use hundreds of algorithms to determine which sites they believe are most relevant to their users for a given search query.  Of all the different criteria they use, one of the most important is their technique for measuring relevance.  Put simply, the more sites link to a web site, and the more sites that link to the site linking to your site, the more relevant your site becomes in the search engine’s eyes.  So if you have hundreds of sites linking to your Smashwords profile, and your Smashwords profile links to your personal web page or blog (and yes, we support this), then that link from Smashwords becomes a positive endorsement of your web site in the eyes of Google and the other search engines.