You’ve come to the right place ;)

Below you can find the page on my website that is dedicated to preorder links at indie bookstores. It’s taken me the past nine months to work out the kinks and get it going, and now I want to share this knowledge with anyone who wants it.

https://www.jakewhosagirl.com/excavate-your-heart/

First of all: why a page like this?

Well, while publisher landing pages are great resources to link to, the indie bookstore section leads to a link on Indiebound. Indiebound is an incredible resource, but it requires people to click several times, which, as we all know, people do not want to do. They want the ease of Jeff Bezos’ hellsite, so we have to give them that but with INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE LINKS!

In addition to being an author, I’m an indie bookseller, so I know how things work behind the scenes here. Most indie bookstores have online order pages run by the ABA Indie Commerce platform, and we pull from a distributor called Ingram. So basically, you need to find the indie bookstores that have websites run by this program, and link to them, because they’ll be able to order the book (as long as it is distributed by ingram and available for preorder).

Back in February, when my preorder links went up, I started by checking to find my ISBN. That’s your book’s ID, and that’s what booksellers and the websites will use to order your book. If your book doesn’t have an ISBN yet, it’s not up for preorder.

How do you find your ISBN? Go to your publisher’s website. Here’s mine. You want the ISBN, not the ISBN 10. So you go to product details, and find the ISBN, which happens to be 9780063078727.

The next part is the most time consuming. If you just want to link to one indie bookstore in your neighborhood, go ahead! You go to their website, enter your ISBN (or just the name of your book), then use the direct link on your website or linktr.ee.

I opted to make a larger list. If you want to use mine, go ahead! You would just need to manually go through and change all the links from my book to yours. I’ve vetted these sites as places that do have my book up for preorder, so you would need to do the same for yours!

In case it seems like a daunting task, I wanted to show this: