Yesterday, I participated in a multi-author promotion for free romances, and for the first time, I included download links for my online store. These promotions offer readers links to the various retail portals, but I added Hazel & Honeysuckle Press to my links – since my books are free there, too. (And some of the portals don’t offer my books free in some territories.)
I noticed last night that not everyone who “bought” a free book actually downloaded it. Let’s take a look at the delivery process at Hazel & Honeysuckle Press. I use BookFunnel for delivery.
When you buy a book in my store, regardless of the price, you need to check out. On that page, you provide an email address.
After your purchase is completed, you’ll get an email from the store. It comes from Hazel & Honeysuckle Press, and the subject line is: Your Hazel & Honeysuckle Press order has been received!
When you open the email, it looks like this:
You will then get an email from BookFunnel. It comes from the address: help@bookfunnel.com
For this transaction, the BF email literally came 1 minute after the H&H one.
If you don’t see the BF email within five minutes, look in your spam folder. Once you’ve whitelisted their email (i.e. marked it as not-spam) all future emails from them will be delivered directly to your box.
The subject line on the BF email is the book title. For this sale, it said: Here’s “Just Trouble – Alternate Cover” by Deborah Cooke
When you open the email, it looks like this:
I’ve put some yellow blocks over personal details. Three of them are the download code for this book for this transaction. The second one is the email address I used for the purchase.
So you can click that top link to be taken to the download page, which looks like this.
When you click GET MY BOOK, a pop-up window opens:
Choose your reader, then follow the directions to get the ebook onto your reading device of choice. It’s very straightforward, though it’s not as instant as buying from the same portal all the time. BF doesn’t know what device you have, so it presents all the options.
The other nice thing about BF is that it creates a BF library for all of your books obtained through BF – provided you always use the same email address. This means your books are available all the time (forever!) for you to move one to another device or reader. You have a back-up this way.
Why am I telling you all of this? Because a high percentage of people who “buy” books through my online store, even free downloads, don’t download their books. (I can check on the back end of BookFunnel that books have been downloaded.) So, I suspect that a lot of people either ignore that delivery email from BookFunnel, or their mailbox filters are sending it to the spam folder.
You have fourteen days to download your ebook before the link expires. BookFunnel will send you a reminder email just before it does expire.
The best way to fix this is to “buy” a free book from my online store and hunt down that BookFunnel email. You’ll only have to do it the once.
Claire Delacroix 