Walmart in the US is now selling indie-published books from their website. I’m guessing that authors whose books sell well on the site will have upcoming titles considered for in-store placement, which is pretty neat. It’s wonderful that they’re also welcoming indie-published titles.
The frustrating bit is their search engine. First, you have to put the author name within double quotes in the search field – “Claire Delacroix” or “Deborah Cooke” – order to get results.
The second thing is the search engine itself.
If you search on “Claire Delacroix”, the results will be The Princess, The Mammoth Book of Irish Romance and To Weave a Web of Magic. All traditionally published titles. If you search on “Deborah Cooke”, the results will be Kiss of Fire, Kiss of Fury and Kiss of Fate. Again, these are traditionally published titles.
But where are my indie titles? I did a little experiment and searched on my publisher name, “Deborah A. Cooke”.
This is recent because the cover for The Beauty Bride available from Walmart is this one, on the left, which only went live in June.
On the one hand, it’s great that all the new Claire Delacroix titles are available from the Walmart website. On the other hand, I think it’s pretty unlikely that people will find them there without any help.
So, here’s a tip. One place to easily find the publisher name on a title is on the Amazon website – and yes, it’s strange to go to one portal to find the information you need to shop at another portal, but Amazon has always been an encyclopedic reference for books. The publisher name is in the product details. Scroll down on the page for The Beauty Bride, and you’ll find this:
It’s not highlighted on Amazon. I just did that here for you. 🙂
I also realized that the True Love Brides series and the Champions of St. Euphemia series aren’t being returned in any of these results. Hmm. I licensed the print distribution for these books to a company called EverAfter, but they have thousands of books. I searched by title for “The Frost Maiden’s Kiss” and there it is:
So, searching by title might be a good plan when you have a specific book in mind.
I’ve asked if this data can be updated, so it’s possible there will be changes. We’ll see.
Having indie books available for sale at Walmart is a good thing and an exciting development. But, remember when you’re looking for an author’s books there to be persistent!
Edited to add – not all titles are there, as of today. I’ve added Walmart buy links to the pages here on the site for the books that are available from Walmart’s site. Maybe they’ll be adding more. (?) Look for my “Buy at Walmart” icon here on my site:
Deborah Cooke & Her Books 
Will your Deborah Cooke books be available in print through Ingram? We’ve been waiting awhile for them to be released through them for our store.
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Which titles are you waiting for, Lucy? I’ve been publishing print editions through Ingrams of pretty much everything. The Coxwell series is there, as are the last three Dragonfire novels. The Dragons of Incendium are a bit different because the stories are shorter – each one is available in a minibook from Amazon, but then there will be trade paperback collections of three novellas and three short stories. The first one of those will be in first quarter 2017. If you’re looking for new editions of the first 8 Dragonfire novels, I don’t have all the rights to do that yet. Fingers crossed that it will be soon!
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