Best Practices in Online Selling

“It’s the drug-dealer model,” Ardai jokes. “Give them a taste for free and then they have to see how the story ends.”

Once readers are drawn in, the site seeks to make it as easy as possible for them to buy a book—or two, or a bunch.

“What we did was create a variety of different avenues into the online ordering and fulfillment system,” Ardai says. Hard Case books are published in collaboration with Dorchester Publishing, whose Web site handles all online purchases. “On our home page, we have several different links that go to the Dorchester back end,” he says, “[such as] the book club, a ‘find out about’ link, [and] a link on the home page to invite people to fill in their name and e-mail, where the lure is [that] we’ll enter you in a free drawing for books each month.”