Writers' know-how

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A universal URL for your Amazon books

As a newly-published Kindle author I very soon discovered a real inconvenience: having to tell people exactly where to look for my book in their country. It's true that Amazon will automatically or semi-automatically redirect you if you go the wrong one, but it's not obvious that that will happen. In any case, it's inconvenient.

However, Booklinker solves the problem. It's free to use, and it provides a universal and customisable URL shorterner. For example, rather than telling people to type this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Education-Conferences-Teachers-education-conferences-ebook/dp/B01M74ZOX0

I just have to tell them to type this:

http://viewBook.at/conferences

This is brilliant, because until recently I was telling my newsletter subscribers and website visitors to look for my book on one of these pages, depending on where they lived:

The full listing of the URLs of my book.

 

Similarly, my author page on Amazon is now:

http://viewAuthor.at/terryfreedman

instead of:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B001KHE4RC etc

There's another, less obvious benefit, which is that sometimes you may not know which country's Amazon site to look at. For example, I had assuned that people who live in Scandinavia would use the French, German or UK Amazon sites, but it turns out that they use the USA one.

The service is free, although you have to sign up for it, and you can have a different URL for each book.

It's dead easy to use:

1. Go to Booklinker and sign up for a free account.

2. Paste in the link for your book or author page:

4. You then choose your preferred link. For example, here is what the screen looks like when setting up your author page:

As you can see, it's not only logical ('view at' -- but you do have a choice), but easy to remember.

Even better, if you are signed up to the Amazon affiliates programme, you can have your associates ID embedded in the url, so you don't lose out:

 

If you have a book in the Amazon store then it's definitely worth your while signing up to Booklinker.

My book, by the way, is this:

Click the pic for more info Amazon affiliate link)