I’m currently working on getting the back matter links in my other published works updated for the link to BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING, at least on the Amazon versions.
It’s fiddly little housekeeping stuff–which tends to mean that I do a book or two and then go off and do something else. But it needs to be done.
It also serves as a nice buffer before I turn back and start the polishing edit on BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING. The revisions are done, but a few days of not looking at it will help me come back to that with fresher eyes.
At some point soon, I’ll have to go back and do the same for the those books that have also been published through Draft2Digital. Which, thankfully, isn’t all of them. The reason I’m not doing that at the same time I do the Amazon book–besides saving my sanity–is that I would like to include a link to D2D’s author page, which is a relatively new feature.
First, I’ve been trying, off and on, to clean up that author page. See, D2d creates the page, allowing the author to edit only certain portions. Well, so does Amazon, come to that. But, while Amazon’s author page isn’t exactly the way I would have done it, there’s nothing there that I really object to. (If I’d done it, I would have put the series books together and in series order, for example.)
I couldn’t say that for the D2D author page, though. See, their author page draws it’s content from both D2D and books2read (same company), which is actually good. It means they also pick up the books that are currently still exclusive with Amazon. But, there’s a hitch–or three.
The first is that if I’ve already created a custom link for a book on books2read before publishing it through D2D, D2D apparently creates a whole new link on books2read. Which means many of my books were listed twice. I think I’ve got that mostly fixed, although some (but not all) of the Dual Magics books appear both in the series group (which is a nice feature) and mixed in with the non-series works in the bottom row. I haven’t figured out how to fix that one yet. Not a deal breaker, but . . . .
I really like the series feature, especially since it puts the books in the right order. (Everything else is alphabetical.) But D2D only knows which books belong in the series based on the information provided when a book is published through D2D. Which means, for example, that there is no series grouping for the BECOME series, yet. I will be publishing BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING through D2D when I have a final version. But I won’t be able to publish BECOME: BROTHERS on D2D until it’s exclusive term on Amazon ends at the end of June.
It also means that I can’t get “Becoming Lioness”, which is a Dual Magics short story, in the Dual Magics group. Because “Becoming Lioness” is still exclusive with Amazon and has to stay that way. Because it’s included in BY SWORD, TALE, OR MAGIC, which is a boxed set of three stand-alone novels that I’ve left in Kindle Select, for now.
But the real kicker is the one I’ve just run across. I can’t find anyway to get an external link to that author page that I can share with readers, like the one above for Amazon. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having an author page. I’ve sent an email to books2read, which is where I have to go to access the author page (took a while to figure that out).
So, that’s on hold, for the moment. No point in updating the books twice if I can help it.
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Meredith Mansfield, Author 