This past week, I finished updating the ebook interiors for my paranormal romances – with the new website landing page links and the new newsletter sign-up link. I also tidied up some prices and revised some metadata. It’s a relief to have that done, but it only is finished because the books are in Kindle Unlimited – I had to update them at one portal instead of seven. I still have about 20 Delacroix books to update with the new newsletter sign-up link and will try to get them done this week.
(I included Thorolf’s cover here, just for fun. It’s one of my faves.)
It’s not a huge issue if you sign up via the old newsletter link, as I’ll be moving new subscribers each month for each newsletter from the old service provider to the new one.
If you have the books already, Amazon won’t push out the new edition to you, because it’s considered a minor update when the endmatter links change. If you buy any of them now (or take them with your KU subscription) you’ll get the new versions.
Here’s the bit I learned this weekend. I was thinking that the old endmatter links to the book landing pages would go 404, since the domain names DragonsofIncendium.com and DragonfireNovels.com have been repointed to this site. And this was my mistake. Once upon a time, when setting up a website/blog at WordPress, you had to choose a name for the site. This predates the ability to register a domain name through WP. Now, you can either choose a free url (which includes “wordpress”) or you can buy a domain. Both of these websites are legacy sites, so they both have default WP domain names: DragonfireNovels.com has the default WP url of https://dragonfirenovels.wordpress.com; while DragonsofIncendium.com had the default WP url of https://incendiumblog.wordpress.com
And when the domains are repointed, the default url – which is a free site – remains live. Both urls bring you here, but those sites are still out there. That’s one thing I learned.
Here’s the second. There are two links available for a page on a WP website. One is the long link which includes the path, like this:
https://deborahcooke.com/pnr/dragonfire/kiss-of-fire/
This tells you that Kiss of Fire is under the Dragonfire tab, which is under the PNR option on the menu at this site. All that info is included in the long link.
The other is a shortened WP link. I like these shortened links not only because they’re less likely to break but also because if I change the location of the page on the menu or even its name, they still work. WP keeps track of that. (For example, I changed Paranormal Romance to PNR in the link to make it shorter after the page was created. The shortlink didn’t change.) The shortlink is always associated with the page. For example, here’s the short link for Kiss of Fire‘s page on this website:
And here’s the short link for Kiss of Fire‘s page on the old website:
It still works! If you look at the url in your navigation bar, though, you’ll see that it’s the WP domain name, not DeborahCooke.com.
So, whenever I used the shortlink in the ebook interior – which was most of the time – it won’t go 404. It will take you to the old site. This is a great interim solution for those of you with older book files, and also explains why I still get traffic on the Incendium site, even though the url has been repointed to the Dragonfire site for a while. I’ve unpublished the Incendium site now by making it private, so following any of those old Incendium short links – which have been gone from the ebooks for two years – will take you to a WP log-in page, not a 404 page. I’ll leave the old Dragonfire site live until the end of the year, or whenever I remember to take it private again.
On to the last books that need updating!
Deborah Cooke & Her Books 