The sorry state of ebook samples, and four ways to improve them

A good ebook sample can turn a browser into a buyer.

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog (“Rethinking Samples“). This version has been lightly edited.

I’m bored with ebook samples. I feel like I’m collecting a bunch and then forgetting about most of them. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone, and I’m even more certain this adds up to a ton of missed sales opportunities. Although this would be impossible to prove, my gut tells me the revenue missed by not converting samples into sales is a much larger figure than the revenue lost to piracy. And yet, the publishing industry spends a small fortune every year in DRM, but treats samples as an afterthought.

Think about it. Someone who pulls down a sample is already interested in your product. They’re asking you to win them over with the material you provide. Far too often, though, that material is nothing more than the front matter and a few pages of the first chapter. Some of the samples I’ve downloaded don’t even go past the front matter. I’m looking for something more.

Let’s start with the index. Would it really be that hard to add the index to ebook samples? No. And yet, I’ve never seen a sample with the index included. Sure, many of these books have indexes that can be viewed separately on the ebook’s catalog page, but why not include them in the sample? Give me a sense of what amount of coverage I can expect on every topic right there in the sample.

How about taking it up a notch? Give me the first X pages of the full content, include the entire index at the end, and in between include the rest of the book but have every other word or two X’d out? That way I can flip through the entire book and get a better sense of how extensively each topic is covered. By the way, if the entire book is included like this, then the index can include links back to the pages they reference.

Next up, why do I have to search and retrieve samples? Why can’t they be configured to automatically come to me? After a while a retailer should be able to figure out a customer’s interests. So why not let that customer opt in to auto sample delivery of ebooks that match their interests? I love baseball. Send me the samples of every new baseball book that comes out. I’ve got plenty of memory available in my ereader, and I can delete any samples I don’t want. Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again: How about letting me subscribe to samples from specific authors? Again, it would be an opt-in program, but I wonder how many interesting books I’ve missed because I didn’t discover the sample.

Finally, this problem doesn’t appear until after the sample is converted into a sale, but why can’t the newly downloaded ebook open up to where I left off in the sample? Seriously, this has got to be one of the easiest annoyances to fix, so why hasn’t anyone taken the time to do so?

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