Phoning It In

So I’ve been a bookseller for about a month now, and it’s been a somewhat interesting experience.

I can’t say I’ve learned a lot about commerce or shopfront skills. Having an online store, at least in this case, is a pretty passive experience. Other than setting up the web portal—the real commerce is handled by the printing company, not me—there isn’t much for me to do, except maybe write more books. That is how it should be.

I did learn something new in the process, but it is more on the technical end. An old friend of mine, who now lives in Iowa, got in touch because he had begun reading Lautaro’s Spear and wanted to talk about it. Happily, he enjoyed it. In fact, he finished it in just a couple of days and was immediately ready to move on to the final book in the trilogy, Searching for Cunégonde. A day later he was back onto me, sounding frustrated. He gave me a blow-by-blow account of his efforts to acquire the book, and it did sound like more trouble than it should have been.

He had begun by going to my book blog. You know, this one you’re reading right now. That seemed liked an excellent place to start. If you’re reading this on a computer, then you will notice that there are all kinds of links on the right-hand side of the page for Amazon (in four different countries), Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple iBooks and more for buying paperback and digital versions of all my books. More newly, at the top of the page is an embedded frame featuring my new portal, Afranor Books, where all the novels can be ordered. How could you possibly not find the book you want in the format you desire from your choice of sellers?

My pal reported, however, that he could find no links for buying Searching for Cunégonde. Say what? Was he on the right page at all? Was he losing his mind? Was I? So then he went looking for the book in the store in his Kindle app. Similar story. He found the book all right, but there was no way to purchase it. Again, huh? It was like a massive government conspiracy—or perhaps just a Jeff Bezos one—to keep the masses from getting my book. Was I being Dr. Seuss-ed? (Actually, this was before the Dr. Seuss kerfuffle.)

Of course, there was a rational explanation for what was seeming like a bad Twilight Zone episode. It emerged that he was doing all of this on a smartphone, specifically an Apple iPhone. Personally, I never buy anything using my phone. It just seems too easy and prone to sudden impulses gone wrong. The last thing I need is to get a bright idea late at night while sitting on a barstool in some pub (pre- or post-pandemic, of course) and acting on it. Apparently, though, people do buy things with their phones, so it occurred to me I should see what my book blog looks like on a mobile device.

To my bemusement, I found he was right. The mobile version displayed all my carefully and thoughtfully written blog posts but none of the myriad seller links or my embedded store portal. On a phone there was nowhere to click to go to a bookseller. Well, actually there was one—a link you had to scroll down to which would switch to the full website display—but you had to be fairly observant to spot it. That situation has since been fixed. At the top of this page there are now links to Afranor Books and to Amazon.com as well as one that switches to the full website with all its numerous bookseller links.

As for his problem when it came to trying to purchase the Kindle version of Searching for Cunégonde, I had that one sussed immediately. In fact, that was how I deduced he was using an iPhone. I already knew from experience that Apple doesn’t permit in-app book purchases for third-party iOS apps. You have to make the purchase from Amazon.com via a web browser, which is what he ended up doing in the end. Hmmm… I wonder why you can’t have the convenience of buying Kindle books in the iOS Kindle app. It couldn’t have anything to do with Apple selling books through its own Books app, could it?

The funny thing is that I had always felt embarrassed about all the links I have on this page for buying my books—like I’m some kind of overly aggressive hard-sell huckster. Then it turns out that people using phones couldn’t see any of that anyway—even if they were looking for it. Oh well.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, yes, I am writing, though not at the pace I would like. The movie blog has been busy lately, and I have been helping friends with their writing. I’ve also been working on a short piece which you may—or may not—hear about later. Meanwhile, there are five chapters to the Curse of Septimus Bridge sequel waiting for me to rewrite and then continue. I’m just about there.

For some reason the first five chapters are always the hardest to get past.