Create and test every purchase link
Test every purchase link on mobile and desktop
Before launch, click every buy link on your website, profiles, and materials on a phone and on a computer, and confirm each lands on the right format page with the right price.
Authors often hire help with this: website or technical.
Why it matters
A reader who clicks a broken link does not try again. Launch week is when the most people click, and it is the week pages change most. Ten minutes with a phone and a laptop before launch is the cheapest insurance there is against sending your best publicity to a dead page.
Your part
- What you do
- Do it. You normally do this yourself.
- Who normally owns it
- Author and Website specialist. Author or webmaster tests
- When
- A week or two before launch, and again the day after (Create and test every purchase link: three months before publication, and again on publication day)
How to do it
The full walkthrough
Links break in ways that are invisible from the place they were pasted. A retailer changes a URL when a preorder page becomes a product page. A link shortener expires. A social profile truncates a long URL. A website theme adds tracking that a retailer rejects. An app-store link opens the wrong app on a phone. The only way to know is to click each one, on each kind of device, and look at where it lands.
The test is mechanical. Take the canonical buy link list and every place it has been used (website book page, social bios, newsletter template, press kit, email signature, ebook back matter, event listings) and open each link on a phone and on a desktop browser. For each, confirm it reaches the correct format page, the correct edition, the right price, and, for a universal link, the right country store. Note anything that redirects through a page that asks for a login or an app.
This is the author's job on every path, or the webmaster's if you have one. Publishers test their own site; they do not test yours. Do it a week or two before launch, when preorder pages are live, and again the day after launch, when pages change.
If a link is wrong, fix the source (the canonical list) first, then every place it was used.
Common mistakes
- Testing only on the device you usually use.
- Testing the canonical list but not the places it was pasted.
- Trusting a link shortener without checking where it now resolves.
- Not re-testing after launch, when preorder URLs change.
- Fixing the website and forgetting the newsletter template and social bios.
What done looks like
- Every link in the canonical list and every place it appears tested on a phone and on a desktop.
- Each link confirmed to reach the correct format, edition, price, and country store.
- Broken or redirected links fixed at the source list first, then everywhere they were used.
- The test repeated the day after launch.
- A note of the test date in the Book Identity Sheet.
Sources and last checked
- Official source
- No single official page for this step.
- Last checked
- Not checked against its source yet.
- How confident we are
- Verified