View From the Publishing Trenches

Are you a small (or micro) publisher or a self-published author who offers potential book buyers the option, on your website, of buying your books from Amazon.com? If so, be sure you’re not overlooking a bit of extra income from those Amazon sales.

Use Amazon’s Associate program!

If you’re not using it, or maybe don’t even know what it is, get started today!

All you have to do is use a link to your book’s Amazon page that includes your Associates ID. Amazon will credit you with an additional 4% referral fee for each sale (it goes up if you sell more during a single calendar month).

The really good part is that you will get a referral fee for every purchase your customers make at Amazon during that particular session. You will also earn 10% on sales on electronic dowloads (MP3 and video-on-demand) as well as on sales of the Kindle e-book reader itself (which currently selss for $299).

One note: Currently, Amazon does not pay referral fees for sales of Kindle e-books, which is really dumb in my opinion. But that’s their rule.

Amazon will deposit your payments directly into your bank account within 60 days of the end of the sales month, provided you’ve earned at least $10 in referral fees. If not, your balance rolls over until you do earn more than $10.

Once you have set up an Associates account, you can log in and get links, banners, and widgets, which you can embed in your website and blog, that will include your Associates ID. However, you can easily build your own text links that will do the same thing. For example, my Associates ID is waltshielauthorc (that does not fit the current syntax, but it was assigned back when Amazon first started the Associates program). Amazon’s link-builder generates the following code for a text link to  my book Devil in the North Woods:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001U9S99O0974655317?ie=UTF8&tag=waltshielauthorc&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0974655317">Devil in the North Woods</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=waltshielauthorc&l=as2&o=1&a=0974655317" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

That codes generates the following display (if your website hosting or blog platform allows the use javascript, Amazon also provides additional code that will produce a pop-up preview of the book’s Amazon listing — WordPress, that hosts this blog, doesn’t allow javascript so it doesn’t work here):

Devil in the North Woods

However, you can accomplish the same thing by shortening that lengthy code above to:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0974655317?tag=waltshielauthorc">Devil in the North Woods</a>

This produces the same display as above (but won’t support the extra javascript preview feature). To build your own code for your books, just substitute the appropriate 10-digit ISBN (it’s on the book’s Amazon page if you don’t know it) for 0974655317, your Associates ID for waltshielauthorc, and your book’s title for Devil in the North Woods.

There are many other options, available in your Associates account, for how to display the link to your book, but test them to make sure your website host and/or blog platform will work with your chosen one.

So, becoming an Amazon Associate is quick, easy, and free. And you can make extra money on your own books. (And you will still get whatever income you already get from each Amazon sale, whether through your publisher, distributor, or Amazon’s Advantage program.)

And, since sales on Amazon tend to become a positive feedback loop, routing your customers to Amazon can have significant benefits — more sales on Amazon leads to higher placement in Amazon search results which lead to more sales which lead to…(well, you get the idea).

I can think of no reason not to use the Associates program to increase your revenue from book sales on Amazon. So, if you’re not using it…

…what are you waiting for?