Every day I learn something new… here I share it with you.
If you are a new author or anyone trying to sell a book of some kind, here is a website you might find useful. I know I do!
Now and then I make great discoveries and if it saves you time and energy so much the better. We are all here to learn.
Lately, (on Twitter) I have seen a few writers wondering about how to make their links universal. I had the same problem and with a bit of research I came across this site booklinker.net. If you have published your book on Amazon but want to include as many countries as possible in marketing links you post on social media, through Booklinker you can shorten the URL and direct whoever clicks on the link to the Amazon site of the country they reside in.
This saves having to cut and paste links from amazon.com, amazon.es, Amazon.It etc to get your book(s) seen all around the world. It’s a really useful timesaver.
You get a choice of link styles as you can see below. I generally use mybook.to but I guess it is good to mix it up if you feel so inclined.
Booklinker also logs which countries traffic comes from so that you know which ones are providing the most hits on your links. As Amazon KDP doesn’t give you this kind of information it’s really useful and interesting to have access to.
Here is what the information looks like for one of my books.
I am sure you will be happy to know that BookLinker is a free tool, provided by the intelligent link management company Genius Link, for authors, publishers and marketers to create localised links that work no matter where in the world your audience is. Simply sign up and go! There is a premium option available too.
Of course there are other sites that do similar URL shortening so you might want to research those too.
I’m not being paid to promote Booklinker, I’m simply writing posts like these because I know how frustrating it can be trying to find the right information sometimes. I will keep my post tips short and sweet on the whole as again, when I’m looking for information I like it when the article cuts to the chase.
Please leave your comments here if you have any tips on this topic.
Of course, if you’d like to buy a notebook to show your appreciation of free information, that would be great! But no pressure. Everytime you do buy a notebook it helps me create more and helps fund my writing ambitions as PetraKidd.com.
Here’s an idea, please subscribe below to get my blog updates…then we can keep in touch. If you have a blog, let me know about it and then I can follow you too.
Norfolk UK is my home, I live in Norwich by the River Wensum where everyday there is something different to see and learn.
I feel a big affinity with the river as I grew up in Cambridge, another great river city. My childhood and teens involved many walks along the Cam where we would watch 'The Bumps,' raft races and as we grew older we enjoyed adventures on our punting pub crawls.
Growing up in a multi cultural university city definitely influenced my reading choices, I am a big fan of Japanese fiction, love French literature and enjoy Shakespeare. As a young teen I entertained myself with Jilly Cooper and Dick Francis and then became quite obsessed with Henri Charriere's Papillon. At school all I cared about was English, Art and French, in that exact order. When I finished with school I went to live and work in Greece for a wonderful year before returning to study English Literature and Sociology. At this point I read more classics like the Wyf of Bath, Wuthering Heights and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man plus poets such as Wilfred Owen.
My first UK full time job was with Heffer's Paperbacks where I devoured several books at a time, excited by the fact I could borrow what I liked. Bizarrely for me I remember reading The Zurich Axioms, I have no interest in the stock markets but it had me gripped. I can't remember why I picked it up but I have never forgotten it. Heffers introduced me to so many authors, via their books and sometimes in person. It was here I learned about all the genres, it fascinated me that science fiction and horror were so popular, I tried reading it all.
Aside from writing letters, it didn't really ever occur to me to write anything myself for many years as I worked my way through a variety of interesting and varied jobs. Then on a visit to the London Aquarium I became struck by an idea so powerful I sat down and wrote my first novel. It went nowhere as really I wrote it because I wanted to. I wrote another novel and again, didn't have the persistance or determination to take it further, I simply enjoyed the process of writing and my characters.
Then years later another idea struck me and during a severe bout of Pleurisy where I couldn't do anything physical for months, I wrote the Eight of Swords and The Putsi. This time I published them as ebooks and they became pretty popular. When I fully recovered, I had to concentrate on my business and looking after my mother who has various health issues and the writing went adrift again for many years until 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world.
March 2020 I moved to my apartment alongside the Wensum to live alone for the first time ever. During the first lockdown I began to write a diary and then the idea for a new set of short stories came to me and in February 2021 they will be published. The Covid-19 Pandemic is not simply a scary virus, it is a historical time and here we are trying to live through it. To many it will feel like a punishment but to me as a writer, in some ways, it came as a gift.
Please stay as safe and as well as you can. I hope to entertain you with my stories as we all try to get through this together, even though we are apart.
Petra
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