Read more does not show up when I write my own Excerpt

On my blog on all my main loops I have it set to show the excerpt instead of the content

If I make a longer post and leave the excerpt text box empty, then wordpress will make it’s own excerpt from my post and show the [...] or a custom link at the end. Thats great however if I DO enter my own excerpt into the excerpt textbox, it will show that text but it will not show the read more part added to it.

Does anyone know how I can make it always show a read more?

Perhaps a conditional statement like the following will work. The logic is: “If the post has an explicit excerpt, add a read more link. Otherwise, use default excerpt behavior.”

if($post->post_excerpt) {
    the_excerpt();
    echo '<a href="'.get_permalink().'">Read More</a>';
} else {
    the_excerpt();
}

You can use this in combination with Gavin’s suggestion to unify the appearance of the “Read More” link.