Authors: How to find your book's URL on Amazon @KayelleAllen #MFRWauthor #Author

Want to know how to get readers to find your book on Amazon or another bookseller? Need to know how to make a "buy link" for your book? Here's how.

Your book's URL

When you go to a bookseller online like Amazon or Barnes and Noble to find your book, how did you get there? The first time, you might have gone to the home page of the store and typed in either your name or your book's title. When you found the book, you clicked on the link and navigated to its page.

If you copy and paste that URL into a document, clicking it will bring you right back. But how long is that URL and what does all that gobbledygook after the title mean? Is there a way to clean that up and make it look better?

Here's one of mine from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Christmas-Kayelle-Allen/dp/1502962403/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Notice the part in bold? It doesn't come like that -- I made it bold so you could easily see it. When you see the letters REF in a URL, it means "referral". That material isn't part of your book's true URL. It's code telling the site how you got to the page. You can safely delete it and everything to the right.

Here is how the true URL will look:

https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Christmas-Kayelle-Allen/dp/1502962403/

All that other code at the end is a way for Amazon to know got there. It can get really long if you've bounced around a long time.

I went to Amazon and searched "romance for christmas" allen. Here's the URL I ended up with on the book page.

https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Christmas-Kayelle-Allen-ebook/dp/B00OSD716G/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1511405487&sr=1-3&keywords=%22romance+for+christmas%22+allen

All that bold text is just a way for Amazon to know how you got to the page. In reality, on Amazon, all you need is this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OSD716G/

B00OSD716G is the ASIN (Amazon Standard Information Number) Amazon needs to find the book. If you copy that number and paste it in the search bar on Amazon, the book will come up. Try it!

When you send a reader to your book's page, you don't need a long URL that is really how you personally got to the page. You want them to have the book itself. Otherwise, Amazon will get misleading info about who is clicking on your book and how they got there.

URL Tip

I keep a document with info for my book and the URLs for its various sites. Each one has the book title, blurb, tagline, page count, word count, date of publication, ASIN, ISBN, and buy links. Anytime I want to enter info for my book anywhere online, I can pop open that document and voila! Everything is right there.

Now you can make a clean URL for every book and send readers right to a page to buy it. Do you have a tip for getting readers to click a link? Please share it in the comments.

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Kayelle Allen writes sweet Christmas romance, but also Sci Fi with misbehaving robots, mythic heroes, role playing immortal gamers, and warriors who purr. She's a US Navy veteran who's been married so long she's tenured.
https://kayelleallen.com