A month ago I wrote about how Google Book’s was costing book sales by automatically generating “buy” links with as much sophistication as a game of pin the tale on the donkey. Google Books links either:
- to online bookshops that don’t carry the book; or
- it searches Amazon by ISBN thereby guaranteeing a “book not found” page because Amazon doesn’t list ISBNs for ebooks
I raised the issue with Google Books, which suggested I contact Amazon. I did contact Amazon and got a reply to the effect that Amazon assigns an ASIN to ebooks and has no intention of listing ebooks by ISBN even though it has the ISBN details. Irritating, yes (why does Amazon give you the chance to give your ebook’s ISBN, then?), but Google Books generating doomed links to Amazon isn’t Amazon’s fault.
The reason for this update is that I received a follow-up email from Google Books:
Our system automatically creates the list of retailers in book previews.
We are not able to manually adjust the list of sellers or the links at
this time. We appreciate your understanding.I have filed this as a feature request. I appreciate your taking the time
to offer us this feedback and encourage you to continue to let us know how
we can improve Google Books. As this is still a young program, new
features are under consideration and your feedback is very helpful.
Although an average of 12.5% of visitors are interested in buying book, I’m not getting the sales because Google Books offers a smorgasbord of broken links that I can’t change.
It’s a better response than I got originally but it’s still extraordinary that a program — however young — should need this to be a feature request. You don’t expect the world’s biggest search engine to generate links entirely based on chance or, in the case of links to Amazon, that are 100% guaranteed to fail.
While I wait for Google Books to come to terms with the idea that links should point to the things they say they point to, I’ve been forced to do as a commentator on the original post suggested and dump the customised “buy” link to my own website. Instead I’m trying a Bit.ly-generated link to Kindle Automation for the Mac.
I’ve taken the decision because I can see from the Google Books reports that some days I’m getting a 25% click-through rate (CTR) to the buy links with my book and I know from Google Analytics that none are coming through to my website, which means my potential customers are trying to find the books through Google Books’ broken links. Hopefully this way I’ll at least take them to somewhere they can buy the book.
I’ll also not be uploading any more titles to Google Books until this is fixed.
Via Steven Lewis’ Kindle Writers blog
OK, so I go to Google Books I find “Kindle Automation for the Mac” I click on the “Taleist” buy link and I get the Amazon page for the Kindle edition of “Kindle for Newspapers, Magazines and Blogs”
Did I do something wrong?
Hi Dean,
Google Books allows publishers to populate manually the buy link that points to the publisher’s name. That link is the one you clicked. I changed the Taleist link to point to Amazon instead of Kindle Automation for the Mac’s site. It isn’t supposed to point to Amazon — Google Books will block a straight Amazon link, which is why I had to use Bit.ly to shorten it.
What I know from my site analytics is that no one clicks that link, probably because they don’t recognise the Taleist name. Readers who want the book click one of the links to online bookshops and those are automatically generated by Google Books. If you click one of those links you’ll see where the problem is.