Publishers and authors need to think about their online marketing strategies. Search engine optimization is one of those strategies. It is important to check the order of your titles in major Internet bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Search engines can be "seeded" to skew results in favor of a site's own interests. For example, Barnes and Noble (B&N) publishes their own books and therefore has a special interest in seeing that it's titles appear at the top of search results, rather than an author who is published with another company, but whose book they are selling. Booksellers aren't out to scam people but some search results are deliberately programmed to favor one entity over another. This practice hurts publishers and authors.

Listings need to be checked to ensure they are appearing where they should be in the search results. If not, publishers and authors may want to bring the situation to the book- seller's attention and rethink how a book is titled and marketed.

When going to B&N this week, I asked them to order a book for me that was not on the shelf. They checked their computer and told me the book was out of print. I e-mailed the author as soon as I got home and told him of my disappointment in not being able to buy his book because I was told it was out of print. He assured me that the book is indeed in print. He immediately called B&N and got a straight answer from them. They modified the programming code to reflect that his book is in print.

I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but I am inclined to think that because the author alerted the bookseller to the problem, they promptly corrected the programming code to place the book in the search engine where it should logically and optimally be located.

Copyright 2006 by Pamela Beers. All rights reserved.