By Steve Windwalker
11.28.2010
Here’s a great tool to help any indie author or publisher connect with readers by sharing free samples of their work. All you need is a website or a blog, a Kindle edition of your book, and the patience to follow some very basic instructions.
What’s it all about? Earlier this Fall Amazon launched the beta version of “Kindle for the Web,” a new feature that should be a tremendous benefit for indie authors and publishers in their efforts to introduce ebook readers to their books, but unfortunately the company has been rather coy when it comes to sharing information to help embed “Kindle for the Web” samples on author and publisher websites and blogs. In fact, the specifics of the way the company has rolled out “Kindle for the Web” have led many authors to a mistaken conclusion that their books are somehow not eligible for the program.
Au contraire.
The beta “Kindle for the Web” program works for just about any book in the U.S. Kindle Store, except for free public domain books, based on my entirely anecdotal and unscientific research.
So let’s see if we can use this post to help open an important door for our readers and for anyone else with whom you would like to share this information. (We have to begin by sending you to another web page to copy the “script” for this tool, because if we simply pasted the script here you would see the tool rather than the script).
Here are the steps:
- Go to this web page — HTML SCRIPT TO EMBED “KINDLE FOR THE WEB” SAMPLE ON YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE — and copy the HTML script from that page into a blog post or onto your website. (Be sure set your blog post or other environment to “Edit HTML” rather than “Compose” mode before you paste the script.
- Select the Kindle edition for which you would like to provide a free sample, and isolate and copy its 10-digit ASIN (this stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, and you can think of it as Amazon’s version of an ISBN) to replace the ASIN in your script.
- Add your own material or copy before and/or after the script to make the most of the sample feature.
Good luck! And please feel free to share your comments or email them to hppress@gmail.com. Naturally, as with anything else, getting this feature to work on your blog or website is only half the battle. The other half, or more, is attracting readers to see the feature on your blog or website.
Here’s an unadorned example of how the “Kindle for the Web” Sample script looks in a blog post:
Note: You may substitute the 10-digit ASIN of your choosing within the single quotes for “asin:” and you may also experiment with and change the values for width and height to make “Kindle for the Web” reader fit your blog. Of course, we hope you will keep the ‘ebest’ value for “assoctag:” which supports the Kindle Nation Daily and indieKindle blogs.
