As an author committed to self publishing, you already know that writing an ebook, formatting it for the major platforms, and getting into the online bookstores is only part of the challenge. The other part—one that will occupy more and more of your attention as you get serious about building a readership for your work—is getting noticed. Getting noticed is no small feat on the Internet, where the boom in epublishing has drawn armies of authors into the mix. Tremendous sales of Kindles and Nooks over Xmas 2011 resulted in a equally impressive surge in ebook sales. January 2012 was the first time in publishing history that ebook versions of the top ten bestsellers outsold printed versions.
The search engine behemoth, Google, could be a formidable ally in your quest to find readers—or, more to the point, give readers an easier way to find you. The Google Books Partner Program offers a mechanism—available for free—that integrates your book into Google’s search results. This includes the text contents of the book, indexed by Google once you send them a PDF (or a physical copy of your book). In return, you grant them the right to display 20 percent (or more, if you choose) of the book’s contents. So, if someone enters your name or your book’s title, ISBN, or a phrase from the book into the Google search field, the search engine quickly finds it, displays the preview copy, and lists all of the places someone can purchase the ebook version or physical copy of the title.
This form of marketing (although perhaps anathema to privacy advocates, a subject for another discussion) has the potential to generate interest in your book and steer visitors to your promotional page. Google provides an option for reviewers to add comments about your book and as a partner you can copy a chunk of code that allows a Google Preview to be embedded in your blog or on your promotional site. This approach works equally well for independent authors, small publishers, or larger publisher, providing an easy way to get the contents of a book fully indexed and accessible to the Google engine.
As an added bonus, this partner program lets you display search results and click rates to give you an idea of who is finding your book, whether they’re viewing the preview, and if they’re buying. If your book is on a unique subject (perhaps the nocturnal habits of marsupials), you’re likely to turn up at the top of a Google search. If you’ve just written a novel about teen vampires, good luck even getting into the top 500.
All you need to start the process is a Google account and if you don’t have one, you can set one up on the spot. The process of joining the program, describing a book, and uploading a PDF of it can take 20 or 30 minutes. If your PDF is larger than 10MB, you’ll need to use the Google uploader (which is Java-based, so be sure to have the Java runtime engine installed on whatever machine you want to use for the uploading).
There are pros and cons to working to promote yourself and your book through the corporate giants, but that’s another discussion for another day. If you’re feeling bold and you don’t fear having your name and your words circulating wildly through the cosmic either, the Google Books Partner Program could be a good way to get noticed and sell some books.