Wednesday, November 2, 2011

How to find your books on international Apple iTunes, iBooks stores

iTunes bookstore, or iBooks as many call it.

As many authors know, or don't know, or guess, or deduce, or think, or figure, or remain oblivious to, or . . . I'm getting out of hand, aren't I? . . . Apple's iBookstore is available in lots of countries.  Smashwords distributes eBooks to Apple as well as to other bookstores.  They do it efficiently and also have the option free isbn numbers for writers, a requirement for publishing with Apple.

It's a little difficult to find your books on iTunes, but not impossible.  Smashwords has this information in their FAQs: http://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#findonapple

How to Locate your Smashwords Ebook in the Apple Store:
Take a look at this (study the URL before you click):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/isbn9781452300030
                country code ^                      ^ISBN ^ 

On Smashwords, find your ISBN by clicking your Dashboard's ISBN Manager.

Note: be sure to take the dashes out of your isbn when you paste it. 

They also promote Russell Phillips' Tools for Authors: http://www.russellphillipsbooks.co.uk/pages/tools.php which has a tool to create the links for Apple.

Now you've found your book.

Here is what my first book, "Rojuun" looks like.  Once you enter the above info, the URL is adjusted to add the name of your book.:

Also, you should now have an author page, which can be found by clicking on "View More By This Author" in the upper right hand corner.

If you look at the numbers in the links above for my first book and my author page, you may notice that the author number is one greater than the first book.  I've done some research and it appears to be that way for all Smashword authors.

Finding your books internationally

Okay, in the links above, you may have noticed that they all have /us/ in the link right after .com.  That is the country code.  I know for certain of 32 countries in which Smashwords distributed books are available.  You can read the recent Smashwords anouncement where Apple added 26 European and Scandinavian countries here: Smashwords Blog

If you would like to be able to see your author page or book in each country, simply replace /us/ in your link with the country code listed below.

US                                 us
Canada                          ca
U.K.                              uk
Germany                        de
France                            fr
Australia                        au
Austria                           at
Belgium                         be
Bulgaria                         bg
Cyprus                          cy
Czech Republic             cz
Denmark                       dk
Estonia                          ee
Finland                          fi
Greece                          gr
Hungary                        hu
Ireland                          ie
Italy                              it
Latvia                           lv
Lithuania                       lt
Luxembourg                 lu
Malta                           mt
Netherlands                 nl
Norway                       no
Poland                         pl
Portugal                       pt
Romania                      ro
Slovakia                      sk
Slovenia                      si
Spain                          es
Sweden                      se
Switzerland                 ch

I found the data on the country codes here: http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/codes/country.htm It seems like a very useful page to anyone who might need info like that.

Anyway, I hope this helps all you authors who have books distributed through Apple.  This is another useful tool that I'm creating largely for my own benefit, but also for other authors.

All my best and happy writing. :)

John

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