Is It Time to Ditch My Back Catalog?

I've written before about how clueless I was when I first began publishing. I didn't know that authors advertised their books. I'd, of course, seen Amazon book ads, but I assumed they were financed by the big publishing houses. I suppose my view was, just publish the book and people will find it.

Even with advertising, my books have remained "unfound". Or to be generous, overlooked. One of my novellas has not sold a single copy. A couple (both of them novels) have sold four.

So, as I was updating my website yesterday and ensuring that every cover on my books page linked to its Amazon listing, I began thinking, is it even worth it to list all of them? Maybe I'm doing myself more harm than good, if that's possible. On the one hand, listing them all makes me look prolific, but they're certainly not selling, and why make that fact evident to someone who might choose to browse them? And the two novellas I secured ARC readers for haven't fared well overall in the review category, thanks (a lot) to the Goodreads bitch who claims I "don't know big words". 

Fellow authors, how do you handle your back catalog? If a reader buys your latest book, do they go back and buy any of your others? I'm not talking about series here, just standalones.

I pondered that I could perhaps only show a handful of my books and create a link to the others, but that seems unwieldy and weird. Or I could feature my three latest or my three best reviewed books and post thumbnails of the others below. Working with Blogger, though, I'd have to create a thumbnail doc in Canva first, since Blogger is unable to do side-by-side anything. If I did that, I could also have two groupings: novellas and novels.

The author website guru I follow has a mantra that is basically, "more is better", but I don't think that always holds true. Sometimes more is just "more". Or as I call it in my case, overcompensating. His other mantra goes something like, "your website is for your reader; not for you". I have to agree. I do enjoy trying to make my website "pretty", which again boils down to overcompensation, but if someone was to (hypothetically) visit my site, what would they want to see? Probably not a long page of unpopular books. 

Authors, please weigh in with your thoughts. Google tells me, definitely yes! Show everything! Your website is your centralized resource, blah blah blah.

Sometimes, though, you've gotta go with your gut.