A broken link
is a broken promise.

Within two years of releasing your book, your external links will stop working.

PermanentLink redirects your readers to working sites,
so you can stay the authority in your niche.

Learn more about your readers. PermanentLinks provide insightful eBook Analytics.

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How do PermanentLinks work?

step1
Step 1: The Click
A reader clicks a link in your book

Let's say you want to link to the Wikipedia page for Link Rot in your book called The Book of Links. You create this PermanentLink:

https://permanent.link/to/book-of-links/link-rot

Your reader clicks on that link from their Kindle or types it into a browser.

step2
Step 2 - The Check
We make sure your link works
We check if your link is still reachable multiple times a day. If Wikipedia is down or the page has been deleted, we automatically find an archived version. This happens behind the scenes. Your readers won't even notice.
step3
Step 3 - The Redirect
Readers get redirected to a working site
Depending on whether we could reach the original link or not, we immediately redirect your reader to a website that contains the content you want them to see. Even if the original website is gone, your link continues to work.
step4
Step 4 - The Benefits
We tell you when something breaks

If we detect that one of your linked websites is not reachable anymore, we let you know after we change the redirect to an archived version. You can update and customize that redirection at any time.

We also make sure you know how many readers clicked each of your links.

No more guesses

Link Rot is a thing of the past

Gone are the days when authors released an eBook only to find the links inside to stop working over time. PermanentLink makes sure that once you link to something, it remains available — even when the original content vanishes.

  • Adaptive Linking

    If your link stops working, we reroute readers to a version that still works. Learn more.

  • Link Rot Alerts

    When a link stops working, we let you know immediately. No surprises.

  • Link Analytics

    Find out which links are clicked, and who clicks them. Understand your per-link and per-project engagement.

  • Custom Domains

    Retain full control over the reading experience by connecting your own link-forwarding domain. SSL certificates are on us!

Start protecting your links

PermanentLinks are meant to last. Here is our Contingency Plan should things go sideways.

The problem with links

What is Link Rot? How do we fight it?

The average URL has a two-year half-life. Within two years after releasing your info product to the world, half of the links in it won't work anymore. Some will start failing early, some later. It has been called a virtual epidemic. Links are rotting away.

How Link Rot affects your book sales

Even just one link breaking can lead to ugly consequences for your book. Merchant platforms like Amazon flag your product as "containing errors." Your readers start complaining. The quality of your product suffers.

Current solutions just don't work

Many writers jump to one of two solutions: either they turn all links into footnotes (or endnotes), or they manually build some kind of link redirection into their author website. Either way, the author is worse off. The links in the book can't be clicked, or they now rely on the author maintaining a complicated technical product and making sure to regularly check if the links are still working. What started out as a piece of text turned into a second job.

A better solution: Adaptive Linking

That's how PermanentLink handles everything link-related for you. Here's how you stop working for your links, and make them start working for you:

  • In your dashboard, you can easily set up new links for your book.
  • Once a link is configured, it will work permanently. As long as the original URL is still reachable, we will redirect your readers to that website. We also make sure to inform the WaybackMachine archiving service to take a snapshot of the URL.
  • We start checking your link multiple times a day. The moment it rots, the adaptive linking system immediately starts to reroute your readers to the archived snapshot of that URL.
  • We also dispatch a message to you in case you want to redirect your readers somewhere else.

You retain full control. We take care of the technical details.

Give it a try
permanentlink

For my book Zero to Sold, links started failing within two weeks of release. Amazon flagged the book, and I scrambled to update the links. It took days for Amazon to check and validate my changes. Then, right after that, more links failed, and I removed all links from the book.

I built PermanentLink so that I wouldn't have to suffer this fate with my next book.

Arvid Kahl
CEO of PermanentLink

The team behind the tool

Meet Arvid

Photograph by Chris Marxen

I'm an author, entrepreneur, and software engineer. I guess that destined me to build a software service for authors. PermanentLink is the solution to a problem that I strongly feel in my own life.

After I self-published my book Zero to Sold, I noticed that my links started malfunctioning. That was the first time I ever learned of the consequences of link rot: my product got flagged, readers started complaining. I didn't have the time to build something solid. Instead, I removed all clickable links from the ebook.

It's not fun to have no links in a book that is supposed to teach readers meaningful things about the connected world around them. But not every writer can quickly set up a custom redirection on a website. Many writers don't even have access to a website like that.

With PermanentLink, I have built the tool that allows authors like myself to write and publish in peace. Because there is one thing you don't need as a writer: more work that doesn't involve writing.

You can find me on Twitter. I write at The Bootstrapped Founder. You can check out my books Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entrepreneur.