Sally Jenkins

I’ve written previously about BookLinker. This is a free service which enables authors to create an ‘intelligent’ link to a book’s Amazon page. The link automatically directs the reader to his home country/currency Amazon site. However, this is of limited use to those authors who have ‘gone wide’.

‘Going wide’ with an e-book means making it available for sale from a number of online retailers, rather than sticking just with Amazon. These other online retailers might include Kobo, Apple, Google Play and others. Going wide increases the number of possible sales but also creates another problem: how to efficiently direct a reader to the site from which he would prefer to buy.

Internet and social media book promotion works best when potential readers can easily click through to the correct page to make a purchase. If a reader has to start searching around in order to make a purchase, he’s likely to lose interest or go off at a tangent somewhere else. It’s important to keep book buyers happy by directing them to their preferred e-book retailer (Amazon, Kobo, Apple etc.) and the correct currency/country for their location.
This can be done by listing all the different retailers’ links but it’s messy and confusing on a blog post and is impossible within the confines of the Twitter character count.

An efficient way to do this is to use the universal links provided by Books2Read. Simply go to the site, paste in the Amazon, Kobo or any other e-book retailer’s link for your book and click ‘Make My Universal Link’. Books2Read will search all online retailers for the book before creating a single ‘universal’ link. This link will take the reader to a choice of all the retailers where your book is available. If the reader has previously expressed a retailer preference via an earlier use of another Books2Read link, he will be taken straight to his preferred retailer.

To see how neatly this works, try this universal link for my psychological thriller, Bedsit Three. (Tip: Select the Amazon option to get the book for only 99p).