This is another useful tip I’m sharing because it took me a while to work out how to do this myself.
When I first started blogging and posting on social media, I noticed that some authors managed to have nice, neat looking links for their books, like this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B6NSXD0
or maybe this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Law-Attraction-Jay-Northcote-ebook/dp/B01B6NSXD0
Where mine always seemed to end up looking more like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Law-Attraction-Jay-Northcote-ebook/dp/B01B6NSXD0/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1460648961&sr=1-4&keywords=the+law+of+attraction
or this:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Law-Attraction-Jay-Northcote-ebook/dp/B01B6NSXD0/ref=pd_sim_351_59?ie=UTF8&dpID=51I3wV9p4SL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_UX300_PJku-sticker-v3%2CTopRight%2C0%2C-44_OU01_AC_UL160_SR106%2C160_&refRID=14Q5ZYWMFCAJ0PQFBVDX
Which actually makes my eyes bleed a little…
They all work, but the first two look much neater and more professional when you’re sharing it somewhere like Facebook and the link is visible to the person clicking on it. It doesn’t matter so much on Twitter as it gets shortened anyway.
How to trim the messy links you get for a book when you search for it on Amazon.
The nice short neat one is what you get if you’re a self publisher and get the direct book link from your KDP account. The long messy links are what you get when you search for the product on Amazon and then follow the link to find it. Or if you click through from the ‘people who bought X also bought Y’ section on Amazon.
However, if you look closely you can see that they all share similar elements, and those are what you need to keep in order to get your short, neat link – while stripping out all the unnecessary bits. So, in order to get a nicer looking link, simply delete the bit I’ve put in red below. And if you want the really short version, you can also delete the part in blue.
http://www.amazon.com/Law-Attraction-Jay-Northcote-ebook/dp/B01B6NSXD0/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1460648961&sr=1-4&keywords=the+law+of+attraction
And you end up with this:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01B6NSXD0
Ta da!
I hope this is useful to someone.
Next time, I’m going to blog about how to make universal links for your books and why that’s a useful thing. If I forget, feel free to remind me next week 😉
If there’s anything else you’d like to know about, hit me up in a comment on on Twitter/FB. Thanks for reading!
