UBLs - Opening Up A New Universe For Book Sales.

For those of you that have come here looking for a blog about Universal Book Links, aka UBLs, fear not. We’ll get to those in a moment.
 
But first, we want to revisit a blog we posted in April 2023, about distributing some of our books through Draft2Digital (aka D2D).
 
At that time, we said that we had sold a few books on that site without doing any marketing for them. People seemed to have found their way there by themselves, probably via the companion site to D2D which is Books2Read (aka B2R).
 
We said then that we would let you know how things were going once we had some more data, which is why we are blogging about it now.

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To save you having to read the blog again, we’ll just give you a little bit of  background to explain why we decided to use D2D as well as Amazon.
 
Basically, while we were selling a few copies of some books in ebook and paperback formats, they weren’t being downloaded on KindleUnlimited. (KU). Putting books on KU requires the author to make them exclusive to Amazon, so they can’t be sold through any other on-line retailer.
 
So, we thought, if they aren’t being downloaded on KU, why are we keeping these books exclusive to Amazon? We may be missing out on sales through other sites.
 
We uploaded the books to D2D which then distributed them through several other on-line retailers. I won’t list them all. Visit the D2D website for the full list.

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And it seems to have worked well for us.
 
We have sold more copies of the books through D2D in 4 months than we had in the previous year through Amazon. It told us something, though we weren’t sure what until we did some digging into the sales reports.
 
Most of our sales, historically, have been to the UK. That isn’t surprising considering most of our authors are British and they write mainly for the British market.
 
We do get the odd sale through Amazon to the USA, India, Australia and a couple of other countries but when we looked at our D2D sales data it was noticeable that we were getting a far greater geographic distribution. Almost none of our new sales were to the UK and our overseas sales were far more widely spread, taking in the European Union, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and New Zeeland..
 
None of our titles have been translated, by the way. All of these new sales are in English.

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It was also noticeable that a lot of the sales were in paperback format, costing far more on D2D than they do on Amazon.
 
The question we had to ask was “Why”?
 
1. Why were we reaching countries we had never sold to before and
2. Why were we selling so many expensive paperbacks?
 
The conclusion we had to draw was that it was because we were using Universal Book Links (UBLs). See - I told you we would get there eventually.

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A UBL takes the reader (a) to the retail site they prefer to buy from and (b) the retailer’s site which deals with the country in which they live.
 
When it comes to paperback sales, this is very important. Some retailers who sell paperbacks either don’t print them in some countries or they don’t deliver books to some countries.
 
So, our UBLs were taking buyers to the sites where they could buy paperbacks and get them delivered to their country.
 
They also had the price displayed in the appropriate currency for their country, or one they were familiar using. That is a strong psychological factor for some people. If someone usually pays in $, ¥ or €, seeing the price displayed in £ can be off putting.
 
When you upload a book to D2D it creates a UBL for it automatically if you also subscribe to B2R (it’s free), which you can then copy and paste into all your marketing materials, which we did.

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OK, if you click on a link to Amazon and it doesn’t take you to your local Amazon site, they will offer to redirect you to your local site but that, also, is too much hassle for some readers.
 
So, if getting better global distribution sells more books, how could we exploit that for the books that are still exclusive to Amazon? After all, we want to sell through all the Amazon sites across the world and we want to make the process as hassle free as possible for buyers.
 
Well, it turns out that those nice people at B2R will also allow us to create UBLs for books that are sold on Amazon but not on D2D. How cools is that?

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So, using this link, we sat one of our team down in front of a PC and set her to work creating the UBLs (look in the top RH corner for the UBL maker) for all the books we sell exclusively through Amazon. It took about 30 seconds for each book title, but we kept her well refreshed with coffee and donuts while she did it.
 
A couple of warnings.
 
Firstly, if you use URL shorteners, such as bitly or tinyurl, they can’t be converted into UBLs. You have to copy the book’s URL direct from its Amazon sales page.
 
You also need to use the link to the Kindle edition of the book, not the paperback. If there is a paperback version, the UBL will link to it, but the link creator doesn’t like links to paperbacks if you paste them into it. 

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The other things is that the system does seem to be a bit flaky and doesn’t always work first time.
 
Our colleague kept getting a warning that the Amazon link she had pasted wasn’t recognised as a link to an ebook, even though it was.

​She found that if she kept clicking on the “Got it” button in the warning pop-up, the link was eventually created. A couple of times she had to re-paste the Amazon URL to get it to work, but a little bit of perseverance and patience got the job done.
 
So, having done all that work, has it increased our overseas sales?

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Well, it appears that it has. We now use UBLs in all our marketing and they seem to be delivering for us.
 
So, our main takeaways from this week’s blog:
 
1. Using D2D can increase your sales, because you reach a wider book buying market.
2. UBLs help you increase sales across the world.
3. You can create UBLs which will take Amazon users to their local Amazon website, wherever they are in the world.
 
If you want to do some experimentation, it may be worth your while, but do remember to unsubscribe your book from KindleUnlimted before you upload it to D2D, or Amazon will get a bit touchy about it.
 
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