Really all universal booklink platforms are a pain in the ass. Either they cost a shitton of money, do only support a specific subset of online stores, are totally US centric or build links to stores in an old URL scheme the store does not support any more. *sigh*
I know how this should be to be a good store in just do not have time or skills to do it *sigh*
Fellow #authors, which UBL platform do you use?
Another thing I do not get over: there is a great piece of software to compile
Your ebook and(!) get the printable PDF fit for different selfpublishing platforms. If you link to another book of you it puts in the link for the store the book was sold on (so amazon for kindle, Apple Books store for Apple and so on). The moment you want to put in the link to another store you can put one generic link - which as to fit for _all other platforms_. >>
>> A reader I have at say smashwords would be routed to the same page as a reader on beam. There would be a UBL great, especially if you use a distributor. But as said in my first post: all UBL platforms are shit.
I wrote a script that takes the round and crestes different versions of it with Links to the store which sre not supported by UBl platforms and the ~200 EUR software.
Some publishing platform offer that they extend your epub with a „by the author“ page and add the links for the store the book is sold in. You have no control how it looks like, which books are advertised and it only works with epub2. Draft2Digital threatens with „nice EPUB3 you have there, what a pitty we can not change anything inside“
The whole selfpublishing industry really has the worst tools. Features by platforms just do not work with a now 14 year old file format. >>
This is symptomatic for the whole book industry. ONIX 3 was introduced 2009. There are still platform for publishing companies who only except ONIX 2. So all software either only supports ONIX 2 or need to maintain two parsers and metadata matching tools. Amazon started to fully support ONIX 3 in 2020. Just showing how bad everything is even for corporate publishers.
And do not get me started on the reporting of sales and payments for #SelfPublishers . Everything is a mess of xls and csv files. APIs to fetch the reports are non existent (KDP, Kobo), incomplete (Apple only delivers sales but not payment reports) or need begging (google play book publishers has an API but you need to beg to get access to it and then you have to use a JAVA client to access it).
There are some tools to help you to aggregate your numbers from the different sources >>
@jascha@ohai.social>> but these tools normally are browser plugins which use your login to get the reports. Yes, it all runs locally but it lacks support for feeding reports from file.
The act of administrating #selfpublishing is a very special hell. I wish I had the time and the skills to fix a little bit of this mess. I started some years ago to write some tool for aggregating reporting numbers but my skills of reading data from file and aggregate them are basically non existent.