All self-publishing authors know (or at least they should know) that Amazon sites are country specific. Meaning a USA citizen purchases from Amazon.com, UK from Amazon.co.uk, and so on. Yet how many of us just focus on selling in our own back yard?
Worldwide Distribution
When publishing to Amazon, you can choose country specific or worldwide sales. I would venture that 99% of authors choose the latter. So why are we not making purchasing our product easier for our customers?
Heather Hart and Shelly Hitz of Training Authors post Are You Losing Book Sales Over This Problem? poses the same question as well as a ridiculously simply solution.
There is a really cool and FREE Kindle marketing tool that will remove the tedious work of placing one link for each country to sell your book. SmartURL. It creates one link that automatically redirects potential customers to the Amazon site associated with their country.
Training Authors has provided an easy to follow step-by-step on using SmartURL, as well as a video. (BTW, DE stands for Deutschland (Germany), GB stands for Great Britain (United Kingdom) and ES stands for Español (Spain)).
Country Codes
Here are the country codes for the current 12 Amazon stores:
United States: US – .com
United Kingdom: GB – .co.uk
France: FR – .fr
Japan: JP – .co.jp
Canada: CA – .ca
Germany: DE – .de
Spain: ES – .es
Italy: IT – .it
India: IN – .in
Mexico: MX – .com.mx
Brazil: BR – .com.br
Australia: AU – .com.au
IMPORTANT! Affiliate Link added to your Smart URL…
Smarturl adds their affiliate id to the end of your Smart URL. This means that they get a % of the sale as an associate/affiliate of Amazon.com. This does not effect your royalties, and I guess that is the payment for using a free URL source. However, if you prefer NOT to have them add their id — then simply add your own to the end.
Sign up for an associate /affiliate account and then apply your id.
For example:
http://smarturl.it/KMStables?tag=onewaybooksan-20
Without my affiliate tag the link would add tag=smarturl-20, and the SmartURL.it compnay will get the the affiliate sale.
There’s More…
When on SmartURL, there is a “Features Toolbox” on the right:
- Add a + to the end of any smartURL to view its definition and public stats
- Add a * to the end of any smartURL to run a diagnostics check.
It seems this tool does a lot more than directing customers to the correct international Amazon site. I will post a follow-up on how self-publishing authors can take full advantage of this free marketing tool.
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Special thank you to the girls from Training Authors… fantastic find!
