How To Safely Link To Your Children’s Book On Amazon

by | Marketing, This post may contain affiliate links.

how to safely link to your book on amazon

In an attempt to support and share my students’, clients’, and readers’ beautiful work, I asked for their books’ clean Amazon link, so that I could (1) purchase the books for my two boys to read, and (2) share it on my newly created SHARE YOUR BOOK page, so others can discover these wonderful children’s books as well. I received so many questions just about the world CLEAN alone, so I wrote this step-by step article on how to safely link to your book on Amazon.

Because it’s such an important topic to know about, I’m going to address and answer the following:

  1. What is a clean book link
  2. Why it is important
  3. Where to find it
  4. How to ‘clean’ the link to your book

What Is A Clean Book Link

I’m not sure if this is the official name, or if there even is an official name for it. However, when I covered this topic in my book How To Self-Publish A Children’s Book (page 127), I simply called it a “clean” link. 

To clean a link simply means to take your Amazon book link and delete any extra data that is not needed to find your book on Amazon. 

Why It Is Important

Besides the question how to safely link to your book on Amazon, you may be wondering why this is important. Here, we have to remember that Amazon collects data on and for anything and everything, simply because knowing how their customers behave is so very important to how they do their business. 

Therefore, any link derived via a search on Amazon has certain details attached to it, including information on who performed this search in the first place.

So if you (the author) are searching for your book on Amazon in order to find its link so you can share it, this ‘un-altered’ link then is directly connected to you. 

Amazon is very strict with its review policies. Oftentimes, book reviews are being removed if Amazon can detect a connection between the reviewer and the author. 

Now, nobody knows how much of people’s review-removal is due to the sharing of ‘unclean’ links, but it happens often enough that we should pay attention to it, especially since we’re working so very hard on getting these reviews for our beautiful children’s books. So why take any risk? 

The goal then is to make any of our links we’re sharing to our book (be it on our website, social media, emails, etc.) untraceable.

Where To Find Your Book Link

First things first. Where exactly can we find our book’s Amazon link? And can’t we just use Amazon’s handy SHARE buttons? 

The short answer is no. 

Because we don’t know how exactly Amazon codes its links, it’s best not to use the provided share buttons, which can usually be found below a book’s price on the right side of Amazon’s sales page.

After searching for either your book title or your author name on Amazon, we’ll see somethink similar to this link right here in our browser’s URL bar:
This is the all-telling link and should NOT be shared, as it contains all sorts of information about the search we just performed. 

Instead, we want to take this link and delete all unnecessary information. Once we know what to pay attention to and how to do it, it can be done really quickly.

And here’s how:

STEPS on how to clean the link & how to safely link to your book on Amazon

I’ve divided the process into steps, so that you can see how to create your very own clean link.

STEP 1:

Before getting started, we should decide what format of our book we’d like to share. In the end, the buyer can click to any format he or she chooses and would like to buy, but if we want to encourage people to purchase the paperback version of our book, for example, sharing the direct paperback link would be the best way to go, so that people land on our book’s paperback sales page, instead of our ebook’s sales page.

STEP 2:

Once we’ve chosen our preferred format, we’ll simply grab the link we see in our browsers URL bar. Again, this is still the all-telling link, so we’ll need to delete a number of things first. 

STEP 3:

I like to start by eliminating everything that comes AFTER my book’s ID number. This is quite a lot of information and usually includes all the search terms we used to find our book via Amazon’s search bar.

STEP 4:

Next, we delete everything that comes AFTER Amazon’s base URL, and BEFORE our book’s ID number, which is usually our book title and oftentimes the author’s name. Whatever we’re left with is our book’s clean link and should be the only link we share. 

For my book, the clean link to the paperback version looks like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997025492

To get the direct link to my book’s ebook version, I simply first select the ebook version, and then repeat all the elimination steps I just shared, leaving me with this link right here: 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0791LY49P

The last and final step we should take is to copy and paste the just created link into our URL bar to test it and make sure it really does lead to our book on Amazon. We wouldn’t want to share any broken links, otherwise, our would-be readers could end up with one Amazon’s adorable but very disappointed doggies:

Save Your Links

To make it as easy as possible for yourself, I’d recommend you save your two links you’ve just created. That way, it’s always readily available, so you don’t have to go through any of these steps again.

There are many different options, but some good places I’d suggest you save your link in would be:

  1. Your phone (Notes app, Evernote app, etc.)
  2. As an email to yourself (with the subject line BOOK LINKS, so you can find it easily)
  3. As a private message to yourself on Facebook (Am I the only one doing this?)
  4. Any other place you usually keep your important information

How to Safely Link to Your Book on Amazon & Sharing Your Clean Book Link

There are so many places where we can share our Amazon book link. In fact, you may have already done so. Because reviews are so very hard to come by, it’s worth checking these links to make sure that all of them are indeed clean links:
  1. Any links shared on your website
  2. Links you’re sharing in emails
  3. Links you share on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.)
Speaking of social media, I thought it might be fun to share what else you can post on places such as Facebook, besides your book link alone. 

Here are some items I share on Facebook, making it as easy as possible for my friends and family to see what I’m up to these days:

1. MY COVER IMAGE: (images of some of my newest children’s books + website)

2. MY WEBSITE (clickable)

3. MY FEATURED IMAGE (Amazon allows multiple images to be featured. I always just include one, to make it appear as big and as prominent as I possibly can)

This is all prime, visual real estate, so be sure you make the most of it.

I hope you found this helpful and answers all your questions you may have had regarding how to safely link to your book on Amazon, my sweet friend. Here’s to sharing our links far and wide – safe and wisely!

~ Eevi

You may also be interested in:

Do I Need A Website (And How to Get One For FREE)
The BEST Tool For Children’s Book Authors
Create the BEST Children’s Book Writing Space
If you found this helpful, you may be interested in my weekly share I send out every Sunday. It’s one of my clients’, students’, and readers’ favorite resource I offer. If you’d like to join, simply add your name and email below. I can’t wait to see you in your inbox!