I’ve written two plugins for WordPress. They’re both free, designed primarily for authors, and available from the WordPress plugin repository.
Mobile Banner
The Mobile Banner plugin was written to address a client requirement. It adds a discreet banner to the bottom of the screen when viewed on mobile (not on desktop). This banner can have whatever text the users wishes, and can link to a any URL.
The client that it was written for used it to link to their mailing list sign-up page, and it is used the same way on this website.
The plugin is available from the WordPress plugin directory, or you can search for “Mobile Banner Robin Phillips” in the WordPress plugins screen.
Local Links
Authors need to link to their books so that users
can buy them. Some online stores have a site for each country that
they operate in. It’s not practical to list the link for each
country, but users often have to use their own country’s site.
Users in the UK, for example, have to buy from amazon.co.uk, not
amazon.com.
The Local Links plugin automatically edits links so that they point to the user’s local store. The links are tidied up, to make them simpler and avoid tracking. It will work on existing links and new ones. Simply add links to your site as usual, and they will be rewritten on the fly to send your visitors to their local site.
Stores supported are Amazon, Apple Books, Apple
iTunes (audiobooks), Kobo, Alibris, Google Play, and AbeBooks.
Amazon has different affiliate codes for the
different country sites. If you have Amazon affiliate codes, the
relevant country’s code will be added to Amazon links.
The plugin is available from the WordPress plugin directory, or you can search for “Local Links Robin Phillips” in the WordPress plugins screen.
UK readers can’t buy Kindle books from the US store
It’s generally considered good practice to link to all the stores where a given ebook is available. What is not always understood is that users in different countries should ideally be directed to their own stores. For example, a reader in the UK should be sent to a UK store where the vendor has one, with prices in British pounds. A user in Canada, on the other hand, would want prices in Canadian dollars.
In some cases, vendors insist on readers buying from their local store. Amazon, for instance, won’t allow British users to buy from Amazon.com. So, if you link to your book on Amazon.com, your British readers will have to go to Amazon.co.uk and find it there in order to buy it.
Universal Book Links
You may be familiar with Draft2Digital’s Universal Book Links (UBL). If you have a Draft2Digital account, or create an account at books2read.com, you can create universal book links. These links take the reader to a page that lists all the stores where the ebook can be bought. A less well-known benefit is that when the user clicks on the link, they will go to their local site if the store has one.
Universal book links are useful in some circumstances, but they require an extra click on the part of the reader, and every extra click is a point where a sale can be lost. If you have space to list individual stores, you can still take advantage of UBL’s ability to send a reader to their local site.
Getting the Amazon link from a Books2Read page
To do this, set up your book’s universal book link as normal, then go to the universal book link page. Right-click on the store that you want a link for, and click “Copy link address” or “Copy Link Location”. The link will have a “?store=” bit at the end, e.g.
https://books2read.com/u/bzppKZ?store=amazon
Use that link instead of a standard one, and your reader will go straight to the local version of the store, without seeing the universal book link page.
Kobo & Apple Links
For Kobo and Apple links, there is another way to create localised links, without setting up a universal book link. For Apple Books, simply insert “geo.” between the “https://” and “itunes.apple.com”, so that your link looks something like this:
This works even
if you didn’t use an ISBN when uploading the book. In this case, the
Kobo book page will show an ISBN starting with 123, which can be
used.
The other option is to remove the country and language code from your book’s link. This is an example Kobo link, with the country code (gb) and language code (en) in bold:
This link will redirect the reader to their local Kobo site.
WordPress Plugin
This is, of course, all really quite technical, and if you have a lot of links on your website, changing them all could be time-consuming. I’ve written a free WordPress plugin that you can use to do this automatically. It’s available from the WordPress plugin directory, or you can search for “Local Links Robin Phillips” in the WordPress plugins screen. It will automatically edit your links on the fly, so all of your existing links will be localised, as well as any that you add in the future.
