Channels & Smart Links
Channels are the retailers and stores where your books are sold, such as Amazon, Apple Books, and Kobo. A smart link is one link per book that sends each reader to the right store for their country. Pubblish builds these links from your editions. It tracks every click. This guide covers the Channels page, how smart links work, and the affiliate settings you control.
The Channels page
The sidebar has a Channels item under Marketing. It opens a page titled Smart Links.
The page lists the buy links Pubblish has for your books. Each row shows five columns:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Title | The book the link points to |
| Edition | The format and ISBN |
| Channel | The retailer, such as Amazon US or Kobo |
| URL | The retailer address, or Auto-generated when Pubblish builds it from the ISBN |
| Active | Whether the link is shown to readers |
A counter above the table shows the total number of links and how many are active.
This page is read-only. You cannot add or edit links here. If your books have no links yet, the page shows an empty state that explains what smart links do.
How smart links work
A smart link is a single web address for one book. It uses the book’s ISBN and looks like this:
https://yoursite/go/9781234567890/
When a reader opens a smart link, Pubblish does three things:
- It detects the reader’s country.
- It picks the best retailer for that country.
- It redirects the reader straight to that retailer’s product page.
If Pubblish cannot match a retailer to the reader’s country, it shows a landing page instead. The landing page lists every store where the book is on sale, along with the cover and title. You can reach this page directly by adding /all/ to the smart link, like https://yoursite/go/9781234567890/all/.
Smart links work for any of your published books. Draft titles are never shown through a smart link.
Click tracking
Every smart link click is recorded. Pubblish stores the country, the device type, the retailer chosen, and where the click came from. It does not store the reader’s raw IP address. This data feeds the Analytics Dashboard for your books.
Where smart links appear
Pubblish builds a smart link for the book card widget you embed on other sites. The book card shows the cover, title, and a buy button. The buy button uses the smart link. See Websites for widgets.
Because the link is always the same address, you can also share it anywhere, such as a social post or a newsletter.
Choosing channels and affiliate codes
You choose which retailers appear in your buy links. You can also add your own affiliate codes to earn commission. These controls are on the Channels tab in Settings. This tab is available to workspace admins and owners only.
To open it, go to Settings in the sidebar, then select the Channels tab.
The tab lists every retailer Pubblish supports. Each retailer has a switch. Turn a switch on to include that retailer in your buy links, or off to leave it out. Retailers with an affiliate program are on by default. Others start off.
For a retailer with an affiliate program, a text field appears next to its switch. Enter your affiliate code there to earn commission on sales through that retailer. Leave the field blank to use Pubblish’s own affiliate code instead.
Both the switches and the code fields save on their own. Change a switch or type a code, and Pubblish saves it at once. There is no separate save button.
What support handles
Two things are not self-service yet:
- Per-edition link overrides. Setting a specific URL for one edition on one retailer is handled by support. The Smart Links page shows these overrides once they exist, but you cannot add them yourself.
- Custom channels. Adding a store that is not in the standard retailer list, such as your own shop, is also handled by support.
Contact support if you need either of these. See Support.