When you’re sharing a link to your book on social media to promote it, do you just go to Amazon and copy and paste the link?
What if someone from another country wants to buy your book? When you share a regular link, it’ll be to the Amazon website for your country. An international buyer will have to go to their own Amazon site and manually search for your book–and chances are, that’s where you’ll lose them.
Universal book links solve this problem. And for the most part, this is a free writer tool. I’ll talk about a few for today’s Writer Tool Tuesday.
BookLinker
This one works well if you have only one book to share–the reason being that they will only give you one free link (per email address, anyway).
However, the BookLinker links look very professional. You can customize the link to include your book title. As an example, I linked one of my books here:
Looks nice and clean, and will bring customers to the Amazon site of their geographical location!
If you want to upgrade, you’ll end up switching to GeniusLink, who owns BookLinker. This is a $5/month subscription. With it you can encode affiliate tags on your link (aka, make more money when someone buys from a link), and you can have more links.
Books2Read
This is a powerful universal book linking tool, and it’s entirely free. Owned by Draft2Digital, this tool will provide you with (as far as I can tell) as many universal links as you want. You don’t even have to create an account. Here’s what the link looks like if you don’t create an account:
If you do create an account, you can customize the link, have all your links in one place, and edit them if need be. You can also add affiliate tags. Here’s the same book, but with a custom link I added when I made an account:
books2read.com/SylviaintheWilds
And then there’s the “Reading List” function. You can create a landing page for all of your works, for example, or one for your series, and a reading list can have a custom link, too. Sure, you can create a landing page on your website with the same info, but I think it’s a pretty cool feature. Here’s the Reading List I made, and a screenshot below:
https://books2read.com/rl/ArceraTrilogy
This will be perfect for sharing on social media!
I’m not affiliated with any of the websites mentioned in this post. If you want to suggest another tool for writers, contact Liz.