I’ve been trying (fruitlessly, for months) to get a particular Amazon service tied into my website. Now, I love computers, don’t get me wrong, and I love geeking out on all the new bells and whistles everyone makes available. But as a one-woman business I don’t have the luxury of sitting around and reading the masses of detail sent every day to help me “market” my business–if I want to get any writing done that is. What goes through quickly gets read and used. What makes me sigh in frustration gets set aside for when I have more time (you know what that means).

So, when everyone kept talking about how authors could access the Amazon samples, tying early chapters of our books back to our websites so readers simply clicked from my webpage to start reading the first few chapters before they bought, I thought, “How cool!” Especially when I saw the format that comes up is much cleaner and more functional than the Look Inside option on the Amazon website. I happily dived into the idea.

Until I tried actually getting it to work with my web provider parameters, blog options-limits, and the other idiosyncrasies that make “It’s good, you’ll like it!” actually translate into “Do not throw your laptop out of the window!” The idea was tabled for more data.

Then yesterday, a wonderful post I read daily called The Passive Voice published a segment about something else–but which also included info on this elusive option (if you don’t already read The Passive Voice, I heartily recommend them.) By playing around with the code available through that newsletter, I finally figured out how to make my web page work so early chapters of my books are available via my website. How cool is that?

Look on my banner above and you’ll see a new option for Chapter One Excerpts. Actually the excerpts are longer than one chapter, but since I write really long chapters, only the first chapter may be complete–hence the page name with the conservative wording. I’ll be adding new links as new releases come online. Anyone can access all the early chapters of my books from the banner link (with the much nicer format I mentioned earlier) or by clicking the link below:

Excerpts