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Saturday, March 16, 2013

No book for me

I'm not posting a book I'm reading this weekend, because I'm too frustrated. Nothing interested me very much out of the new releases this week, but when I found the one title that did, an Ellora's Cave sci-fi, I could not for the life of me find a link to read an excerpt. I asked on Twitter and Facebook for help to no avail.

Has EC taken them down? Was it a momentary glitch? Am I just that blind? Because I don't buy 95% of my ebooks without reading an excerpt first.

So in my ongoing frustration, I didn't buy anything at all. EC lost a sale. And if the lack of excerpts on the site is a permanent thing, they've lost me as a customer, unfortunately. That makes me sad. :(
Posted by Vivien Dean at 2:00 AM
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4 comments:

Clare London said...

I hear ya. I don't buy anything anymore unless I can get a feel for the author's style. I've been disappointed too many times to take the risk.

Come early summer, do you fancy doing a head-2-head interview between us? I think it'd be fun to feature on our blogs!

March 16, 2013 at 2:57 AM
Karla Doyle said...

You're not the only person finding the new EC website difficult to navigate. :(

When you're on the book's page, there's a magnifying glass in the top right corner of the book cover. You need to click that, it'll take you to a secondary page where there's a link on the left side that says "Excerpt".

It's not a great set up, to say the least.

March 17, 2013 at 6:14 AM
Vivien Dean said...

Thank you so much for pointing out how to do it, Karla! Now I can still get books there.

But wow, talk about non-intuitive for buyers at all. I assumed the magnifying glass was to make the cover larger for people to see. That's what it, or something similar to it, does on most other publisher websites. Since cover art very, very, very rarely factors into my purchasing a title, I just ignore it most of the time. I would never have found that, so thanks again. :)

March 17, 2013 at 8:08 AM
Karla Doyle said...

You're welcome. And you're absolutely correct -- most people see the magnifying glass symbol as a way to enlarge the image, not access more features. Very frustrating for potential customers, and for us EC authors, too.

I'm glad I could help! :)

March 17, 2013 at 9:23 AM

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