Promoting Your Books in Apple's iBookstore (iBooks)

With Apple slowly becoming a player in the ebook retail business, self-published/indie authors need to take advantage of Apple's growing share of the ebook market.

While Amazon's Kindle will certainly continue to have the largest share of the book market, Apple has a legion of loyal device users and in time should command a bigger share of the market.

Amazon provides a significant number of tools to help authors sell their books. It can be confusing at times and you have to pay attention to the ever changing landscape of Amazon, but Amazon does want authors to be able to play a role in selling their own books.

Apple is now providing some simple tools to help authors promote their books from their own blogs and websites.

The first tool I tried was Amazon's "build a widget" tool. Once you on the page, you will see the image shown below:

Once you click on the Add/Edit Book List the pop-up shown below will appear. Simply type in the name of the book or the author and the book will appear. Click on add the title and it will move to the box at the bottom. The order the books are listed in can be changed by simply dragging and dropping.

The final widget looks like the one I created below. The image was taken from the blog on my authority site.

 

 The other tool Apple has made available is called iTunes Link Maker. As soon as you arrive on the page, simply fill in the title of your book and the appropriate drop boxes and hit search.

 

Click on the blue Book Link and the pop-up box shown below will appear. I removed the HTML code for my book before taking the screen shot you see. 

You have the option of obtaining text only, a small button or a large button.

I plan to make good use of all of these tools in my efforts to let the readers of my authority site who prefer to use iBooks that my books are slowly becoming available in the iBookstore!