D2D Authors Page Books2Read- Painful and no easy image links for posting to social media

I saw a couple of D2D videos on how to and they were all a bit vague on actual setup of Authors page with Universal links for books on other sites

There is mention that you can add links but no-one demonstrates how this is done. A bit irritating.

From what I can understand when you create Universal Book Links (UBL) in Books2read they then all populate the Authors page then you can drag them around to where you want.

So the page can be setup with all the UBL’s that are created.

Supposedly you can create your own and have them pointing to a book elsewhere, so I did this for all the books I’ve got on KDP in the Kindle Select Store. I created a UBL and created custom UBL’s for them all.

BUT

They all don’t populate, so only some come across.

I’ve been faffing with this for over 3 days and finally accept that can’t do what I want (to show all the books I have published) so will try and leave a reasonably tidy Authors page.

The Setup

When you click New Carousel it brings it through but doesn’t populate with anything new. You need to drag a book from another carousel to the new one.

You can copy it or delete it from the left sidebar, but you can’t go and get your UBL’s to come across if they haven’t already.

UBL Page

The UBL page seems pretty straightforward but it doesn’t seem to auto-populate the Authors page.

Also there seems to be doubling ups and you can deactivate some but they the deactivated ones still show up.

The video’s I’ve seen on this topic so far seem to gloss over when there is a problem, so I think it’s a bit of a pain.

Books2Read Reading List

So, there is a reading list that you can create, and in that you can select the books from the green icon and choose which ones to add, so I could add all 7 of my Revit 1 book (unlike Author page where only 3 were selected, and not my preferred ones)

I thought there was a n association with the carousels between the Reading list & Authors page, they both seem to work on the same logic, but I haven’t been able to bring any across from Reading list to Authors page.

End Comment

Overall a pre-formatted web page with all the books sounded great, but execution not so great. I wasted a lot of time and the videos are hard to find and not clear.

A nice idea to add some help pages to the process would seem obvious, or maybe its in Beta and still being built.

Personally I found the whole experience annoying and frustrating. There is something there and I’ll leave it as that. Not a particularly useful marketing tool, I’ll build my own website instead.

Also , for social media I like the KDP embed image for the book that Books2Read doesn’t have. The image and link to where to buy, far more visual than a standard link. The link to the free D2D books is good, that is the only thing that has worked to date.

Overall I’m finding not too much value publishing to D2D. It is on a lot of other platforms but my marketing efforts seem to push people to KDP rather than the other sites and they do not have much to help me, as author hawking my book, to get people to go to their sites.