First, here is the wrong way to link to an Amazon book. Search for the book on Amazon, click to open the book’s detail page on Amazon, copy the webpage url, and paste it.
What’s wrong with this? It makes the url much longer than it needs to be.
See this with an example. I’ll go to Amazon’s homepage and type “self publishing chris mcmullen” in the search field, and click on my own book. (I would happily have used your book as an example instead, but you didn’t ask. :-)) Now I’ll copy the webpage url:
(Yes, of course I could have given the link a short title. When you insert a link, you can make the text for the link different from the url itself. But that’s not the point. The point is that the url itself can be much, much shorter.)
So what’s the short way to do this? First, find your book’s ISBN (the 10-digit number will work) or ASIN (if you have an ebook that doesn’t have an ISBN, use this). You can find this number on your book’s detail page at Amazon.
The short link has the form http://amazon.com/dp/ISBN (or use ASIN in place of ISBN). Obviously, you have to put the ISBN number in place of the letters I-S-B-N at the end. 🙂
For example, the short variation of the above link is:
http://amazon.com/dp/1480250201
That’s much shorter (and I didn’t even have to use text in place of the url to make it short).
Actually, you can make it even shorter than this. Use amzn instead of amazon and remove the /dp:
But it’s not much shorter, is it? When you use amazon, people can see they’re being directed to a site that they (hopefully) trust, but when you use amzn instead, it might arouse suspicion (well, it shouldn’t, but it probably will).
Every day, I come across many links that authors have posted to their books, which use the long form instead of the short form. You may have noticed this, too. The easiest way to spread the word is to use the short link yourself whenever you post a link to your books. Somebody may notice and try this out with their own book.
Just think about how much we’re inconveniencing those poor little electrons when we make the link longer that it needs to be. J/K. 🙂
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Thanks for this helpful post Chris – and thanks for helping me on the KDP forum too!
Warmest wishes, Julie http://amazon.com/dp/B00B8UBMO4 (Just using your advice here! ;o))
I’m glad that it was helpful. 🙂 Good luck with your book.
Thanks. And thanks for having a look at my blog – glad you liked the post about happiness. 🙂
Just came across your post (2 years later) because I was trying to find how to create the short “amzn.com/…” links for my Urban Fantasy series. When I try to combine your method above with my affiliate tag, it only gives me an error page. Not if I use the (too) long version of the link created through Amazon. Any idea how to combine the “&tag=brida_anderson-20” with the short version?
When I’ve used the affiliate tags (I’ve done this from a different website; not this one), I’ve used the web hoster’s format for making the displayed text different from the website url. How you do this depends on the website where you try to implement it (or can be done via HTML). Amazon also has options where you can insert the HTML for an image, for example, and the customer clicks on an icon showing the product to arrive at Amazon via an affiliates link.