Are you creating a website to promote your book? There’s one thing your site must have: a sample chapter.

You may be saying "An entire chapter? That’s a lot of information they’ll be getting for free. I thought the idea was to get them to pay me for this stuff!"

And they will pay you. Particularly if you pick out the best chapter in the book. Let me explain.

When you go into a bookstore, what grabs your eye first is a book’s cover. If it looks interesting you may read the reviews on the back, or perhaps the flap on the dust jacket. But you’re probably not going to buy it unless you look inside the book. You want to know if this person can write, and if what they have to say is worth knowing.

This is why you have to put a sample chapter on your site. Your site is the cover, the book flap, and the store, so to clinch the sale you want people to open your book and read. That’s why it ought to be the best chapter of the bunch. Follow the old sales trick of leading with the highest quality, so the buyer will be impressed and take your whole line.

There are plenty more reasons to put a sample chapter on your website. Every search engine optimization guru will tell you your site should have lots of meaningful content, rich in keywords. What would be more meaningful, or richer, than a sample chapter from your book?

Another reason to use a chapter is that you already have it. Getting a lot of copy written for a website can be tough. You want good copy that can rank high in the search engine results. Existing work, like a sample chapter, means just that much less material you need to come up with.

Michael Quarles is the author of Building a PC for Beginners. His website is http://www.monkeyseemonkeydobooks.com