Today I have a guest author for this post. Maggie Foster is a member of my writing group and a dear friend! I interviewed her for my book, From Rough Draft to Published. She mentored me through publishing process. She writes mysteries and currently has four books out. Her books won multiple awards, including:

First Place winner in the 2019 Texas Association of Authors Best of Texas Books Fiction Awards, Medical Thriller category
Second place winner in the 3rd Annual (2019) PenCraft Awards for Literary Excellence in the Mystery-Sleuth genre
and more!

Her books are about an insatiably curious ICU nurse named Ginny who finds herself investigating mysteries.

Final Fling is my favorite of hers so far! Ginny goes to the highland games. A woman is found on the caber toss field. He head has been crushed by a caber.

Ginny’s friend is accused of the murder, so she must help solve this mystery and clear her friend.

Final Fling has a really fun, really implausible element in the story, but it is based on a true news story.

You can puchase any of her books on her website or wherever books are available online. https://www.maggiesmysteries.com/books

If you like to support indie bookstores, purchase here https://bookshop.org/books/the-arms-of-death-loch-lonach-mysteries-book-one/9780998985800

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Without further delay, here is Maggie’s Article:

Linking an eBook Series Using KDP

CONGRATULATIONS! You have a book (or two, or three) in a series, published through Kindle Direct Publishing and available on Amazon, and you know your readers will want an easy way to find the rest of them, no matter what book they pick up first. The keyword in that sentence is, “easy.”

Now that Indie Publishing has taken off, some experts estimate there are more than two million new books published every year. That’s a lot of books for a reader to wade through to find yours. Luckily, KDP anticipated the need and has developed a Series Page for authors to use to link books in a series. What’s more, it’s automatic. You don’t even have to set it up yourself.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is, and it isn’t.

The first thing you must understand is that KDP publishes both e-books and Print On Demand paperbacks, but these are treated as two separate systems. To manage POD books, the author will need an Author Central account. To manage the e-books, the author will need to deal with KDP.

This article deals with the eBook (Kindle) Series Page.

To find your Series Page (if you already have one), pull up one of your in-this-series books on Amazon and look at the star rating. Immediately under that (in tiny type) you will find the name of the series and the number of the book in the series. In example: “Book 1 of 3 in Loch Lonach Mystery Series.”

As already mentioned, if you set up a series of books correctly during the initial publication phase, you don’t need to do anything to have a Series Page created for you.

On the first screen, the Kindle eBook Details page, there is a section entitled “Series.” In the first field, you must enter the name of the series and in the second field the digit that specifies the book’s position in the series. The series name MUST MATCH for each book you want included.

For example, C.S. Lewis wrote seven Narnia books. The series title is “The Chronicles of Narnia” and each book is numbered in the order in which they were written.

Once the Series Page has been created, if the author wishes to add another volume to the series (wait until after it is published) they will need to request that change from KDP.

Sign in to KDP, select HELP from the menu across the very top of the page.
Scroll to the bottom of the new page and look to the left. Find the yellow “Contact Us” box. Click.
Choose “Amazon Product Page and Expanded Distribution” Click. A new menu will open.
Choose “Kindle Series Collections”
Choose e-mail or phone call. (NOTE: E-mail leaves a paper trail.)
Send KDP the following information:
1. Title
2. ASIN
3. Series name
4. Series Page URL

How rapidly the changes show up will depend on workload, day of the week, holidays, and so forth. It can be 3-5 business days but is usually much faster.

You can use the Series Page URL in your marketing efforts, including adding a link to your book descriptions, to drive traffic to your Series Page. From the Series Page, readers can visit the individual book pages or buy the entire collection with one click.

About the only downside to the Series Page is that reviews do not follow the books. Readers can add reviews, but they are supposed to be for the entire series. So if you have rabid fans, ask them to leave a series review on your Series Page.

Happy publishing!

Maggie Foster

https://www.maggiesmysteries.com/the-arms-of-death

maggiesmysteries@gmail.com
lochlonach.com
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