Increase your readership with oAuthor

After the initial excitement of your launch comes the challenge of helping new readers ‘discover’ your book. A great review can boost sales and there is what has been called the ‘Amazon Effect’ where books can soar up the rankings - but do you wonder about all the potential readers who prefer other e-readers than Kindle? In this new series of posts, I’ll be looking at some of the new sites offering authors a page where they can promote their work and make it easier for readers to buy their books.

Based in Ireland, oAuthor (see http://www.oauthor.com/) aims to put indie authors back in control of the book selling process and already has over 380 authors and 1,100 books represented in 2014. It is free to use and only charges a small transaction fee for every book the author sells directly, to cover the cost of using the services and any credit card transaction.  

The site was created by Nuala Moran, author of 27Secrets, who told me, “Once I actively marketed my book I began to see sales and my dream of making a living from writing blossomed. Out of habit, I defaulted to directing all my readers to the Amazon store.”  This is when her OMG moment happened. By a single link to one book selling page, she could offer readers a simple choice of bookstores and downloads.

Some authors sell ebooks in different formats directly from their personal websites – but the new oAuthor site takes care of that for you. I recently created oAuthor pages for each of my novels. You can see the page for my latest novel WARWICK here: https://oauthor.com/buy/bn.  It takes about five minutes to create the page (if you have all the files and info to hand) and everything is under your complete control. You can upload as many different formats of your book as you wish, for direct download by readers. You can also add links to your where book is available on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble etc. The oAuthor Selling Page also has ‘geo-targeting’, which directs your readers to the correct Amazon store for their country.

I find the oAuthor page universal hyperlink is a useful way to raise awareness of your books on social media. It was also good to see that the site includes helpful stats about when and where in the world potential readers are viewing your books - and 'clicking through' to your other sites. To get started, simply visit www.oauthor.com and follow the on screen instructions. You can find Nuala Moran on Twitter @NualaEMoran and Facebook.