After more than a year of planning and work, the team has rebuilt Booklinker from the ground up to provide authors, publishers, and book marketers with the best free universal linking tool. And it will continue to be free!
We are excited to announce that, Tuesday, July 19th, 2022, the new Booklinker went live. We hope you will love the completely redesigned dashboard, a seamless link-building experience, and an absolutely killer new feature: Truly universal book links that present readers with localized purchase options for stores where your book is available. At launch, whenever you create a link to a book that is available at both Apple Books and Amazon, that link will take your readers to a beautiful landing page showing options to buy at either store.
The best part? All of your Booklinker links (myBook.to, viewBook.at, etc.) will now be even smarter and help you sell even more books, no action necessary on your part!
Updates to your existing book links will continue in a phased approach through August 2022. Your updated Booklinker links will continue to send readers from around the world to the book you’re promoting, but soon your readers will be able to choose their favorite bookstore as well.
For a book that is exclusive to Amazon (e.g. a book published through Kindle Unlimited), the readers’ experience, after clicking a Booklinker link, will remain the same as before — the reader is sent to the recommended book in their local Amazon storefront (Amazon now has over 20 regional storefronts!).
For books that are “widely distributed” (e.g. a book available on multiple different retailers such as Apple Books), a reader clicking on the link will now be given the option of where they’d prefer to buy the book. Our research shows that the conversion rate more than doubles when giving readers a choice of where to buy!
Smarter links are not the only benefit of the new launch. The Booklinker service has been completely rebuilt to be mobile-first, more insightful, and easier to use. And, we’ve introduced affiliate support (details below), so you can earn more from the book links you share.
Tomorrow’s launch isn’t the end of exciting new things coming to Booklinker. We’ve got a number of additional updates slated to be rolled out in the coming weeks and months.
It’s an exciting next chapter for Booklinker as we celebrate the service’s ninth birthday. Read on for more details.
Sell More Books
At the core of this rebuild is our mission to help you sell more books. We achieve this by making the links you share even smarter to ensure they work for your entire audience.
The truth of the matter is that Booklinker has been solely focused on Amazon for too long. While Amazon is still a great bookstore and a dominant player in the space, many other amazing bookstores are available. To best serve your readers, you need to make sure they are able to easily buy from their preferred store.
Sometimes a book is exclusive to Amazon. No problem! Nothing changes; your links work just as well as they ever have.
But when you are promoting a book that is available across multiple retailers, we want Booklinker to make it easy for your readers to buy on their favorite platform.
Here’s how it works:
First, when we detect a book is available in other retailers, we will present the reader with a “Choice Page”, a mobile-optimized landing page that includes high-quality cover art, the title, and buttons to the various bookstores that sell that specific book. We are excited to launch with Apple Books and Amazon, with more retailers teed up for launch soon (details below).
Second, we’ve integrated with multiple bookstores to regularly check if a specific book is available in their catalog.
This means you don’t have to do anything when availability or distribution changes. We will dynamically update a link to be direct to Amazon should the book suddenly become exclusive. Or when a book breaks out of Amazon exclusivity, we’ll automatically update the link, so you don’t have to. This also allows us to add support for additional global and regional bookstores as we continue to expand the functionality of the Booklinker service.
Save More Time
Besides making Booklinker better for your readers clicking on your links, we also completely rebuilt the service to make it faster and easier for you to use.
A new link can now be built in just seconds in three steps (two of which are optional).
Step 1: Paste a book link. Simply provide an Amazon or Apple Books link and your book link is ready to go.
Step 2: Customize and claim (Optional). New users can either save the link instantly without an account or claim it to unlock customization, management, and reporting.
Step 3: Take your link and run! (Optional) Your new universal book link is available immediately if you already have an account or after email confirmation for new users. You can check it out yourself (click “Go to link” or copy the link to your clipboard to paste it elsewhere and avoid any misspelling or wrong case mistakes).
On top of simplifying the flow to build new links, we’ve also introduced these features to make Booklinker easier to use:
Mobile first! While the new Booklinker works great on full screen on your desktop, it also now (finally!) works seamlessly on your phone and tablet. This means you can quickly build links from the beach (or if you are like the rest of us, you are building links while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store).
No more passwords! Booklinker has moved away from requiring you to set, remember, and reset passwords to access your account. Your account is tied to your email and just as secure as ever. To access your account, you simply type in your email address and click to “Send my login link.”
Then jump over to your email and click the authentication link we sent you to jump into your account automatically. Simple as that!
Please note, however, that these authentication links are device and browser specific. This means if you click the authentication link on your phone and build a link there, you’ll need to repeat the login process from your desktop should the next link you create happen from your desk. You are welcome to log into as many devices/browsers as you’d like; however, we’d encourage you to log out of any devices you don’t regularly use or are shared.
Better Links List and Reporting! The old links list was a bit of a beast and wasn’t always as reliable as we would have wished. With this new release, we’ve split the links list out from reporting. The new links list is much simpler and still provides key insights into the total clicks by link.
However, you can also now go deep on each link to see not only your total clicks and break them down by top countries but also report on your audience’s preferred bookstores.
Earn More Money
While earning royalties on your book sales is likely an important revenue stream, the ability to earn affiliate commissions from the same thing you’ve always been doing, promoting books to your readers, is often a bonus. A bonus that can really start to add up.
With this new launch, you can add affiliate tracking information to your account, so the links you share have the potential to earn commissions.
At launch, Booklinker supports the Apple Services Performance Partner Program, the affiliate program that helps you earn money from referrals on Apple Books.
As we bring on additional booksellers in the coming weeks and months, we’ll also be adding support for their affiliate programs.
Unfortunately, we can’t support Amazon’s affiliate program (Amazon Associates) with Booklinker at this time. Conversations with Amazon are ongoing, and we hope an arrangement can be made to support their well-known affiliate program in the future. In the interim, if using Amazon’s affiliate program with your book links is important, we’d encourage you to upgrade your Booklinker account to Geniuslink. More details are below.
More To Come
We’ve got a number of additional features and functionality lined up and are excited about Booklinker’s direction over the coming weeks and months.
This includes:
More retailers! Our short list of additional retailers to support include those that operate globally or ship internationally so we can continue to ensure your readers worldwide are taken care of. This includes Kobo, Google Play Books, and The Book Depository. Please reach out if there are additional retailers you’d like included!
Start with an ISBN! Currently, to build a universal link with Booklinker, you need to provide us with an Apple Books or Amazon book link. Soon we’ll be able to build you an intelligent book link starting with just an ISBN.
Easy Affiliate Program Signup! Integrated Apple Books affiliate signup flow is coming soon. Apple has partnered with Booklinker to make it easy and seamless for authors to join their affiliate program right from the Booklinker app.
Questions?
We’d like to think the new Booklinker is plain simple to use, and you’ll intuitively be able to explore all the new functionality. However, if you run into any issues, please don’t hesitate to reach out at help@booklinker.com.