If you have any questions about the site, please ask here...

This website is well organized and thought-out. Thanks for inviting me and hosting my books. Best wishes for success.

@brian-braden Thanks. I hope you stick around to help make it a success!

I have a sci-fi children's book that is paper only. Can I submit it?

You can if the correct genre is there already, but at this time, I need to finish adding the juvenile BISAC codes.

Book submission process / waiting on book approval:

I've noticed several books by different authors in the "draft" stage. If you've been waiting on approval, be sure you complete the submission process by going through every section of the book details. and clicking the submit at the final section.

To see what the status of your book is, check your books section of the author dashboard. If you see your book as "draft" under status, you haven't finished the process. The Spotlight team doesn't know if your book is ready for review unless you reach the point of submitting it.

If your cover image is an issue, make sure your filename has no spaces in it. I've learned that this system is fussy about filenames. If that's not the problem, check that the size and format match the fine print under the cover area of the book submission/update form.

ps--I'll add this information in the Help & Support section also.

There was a question emailed to me about the buy clicks in the analytics being higher than page views and I have an answer for anyone wondering about that (courtesy of the web developer):

One page visit can create several buy clicks. A page view is counted once when someone opens a book's page. But that same page shows multiple "Buy" buttons (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.). If a visitor opens the page once and clicks two or three of those buttons, that's one page view but several buy clicks. Clicking the same button more than once counts each time too.

Authors testing their own links. We intentionally don't count an author viewing their own book page (so they can't inflate their own view numbers). But if that author clicks their own "Buy" buttons to check the links work, those clicks do get counted. So an author checking their own links adds buy clicks without adding any views. On a newer book with light traffic, even a little of this flips the ratio. (Note--this is something I've asked the web developer to stop tracking.)

Revisited or shared buy links. Once someone has clicked through to a store, returning to that link later (from a bookmark, browser history, or a link shared in an email) counts as another buy click, but there's no fresh page view to go with it.

Book samples - a workaround to make them possible:

I had an idea from someone asking about having a sample on the platform. While it's not set up for that, you could create a custom purchase link for a sample and link to a document hosted elsewhere. Those custom links are very useful!