NovelRank Trouble – Amazon Closed Affiliate Accounts in Colorado

As of this morning, March 8th, Amazon has announced that they are closing Amazon Affiliate accounts for Colorado residents in reaction to a new state sales tax law enacted on February 24, 2010. While users may not be aware, I’m a Colorado resident, and the Amazon Affiliate program is how NovelRank survives as a free service for authors to track their sales rank. The program pays a small percentage fee to me when anyone purchases any product on Amazon when clicking through NovelRank book links to Amazon pages. This costs the buyer nothing at all.

Amazon Affiliate payments were covering the website hosting costs for running the service for a total cost of $348 a year, but did not cover the 217+ hours I have spent building and improving NovelRank. I LOVE doing NovelRank, but this is really really bad as the hosting costs are now an out-of-pocket financial cost for me. I’m scrambling to try and get around this (or hope that Colorado law makers repeal the law and thus Amazon reinstates the Associates account). Till then, thank you to the two individuals who have donated directly to support NovelRank, and if you are able and wish to, a small donation would go a long way in allowing NovelRank to continue serving you (I have a lot of books to giveaway!).

Sincerely,
Mario Lurig
Creator, NovelRank

The full email I received this morning:

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado’s new law to members of the General Assembly [ http://www.leg.state.co.us/Clics/CLICS2010A/csl.nsf/directory?openframeset= ] and to Governor Ritter [ http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite/GovRitter/GOVR/1177024890452 ], who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

Best Regards,

The Amazon Associates Team

Update: March 9, 2010 10:04 AM
According to WSJ about $35 million was generated for the 4,200 affiliates in Colorado. Estimated $1.62 million then in lost state tax revenue for a ‘projected’ $5 million from the new law.

Update: March 12, 2010 7:14 AM
No movement from Colorado Legislature. NovelRank isn’t going away, even if it is out-of-pocket, it will be here for at least the rest of 2010. I’m working with family to move affiliate revenue to one of them in the state of Florida. It’s a ridiculous burden, but it will work. Thanks for the kind emails and the donations that have been made.

NovelRank Book Giveaway Kick-Off! “MAGGIE: the dog who changed my life”

It’s officially the start of the NovelRank Book Giveaway, brought to you by the kind and generous independent authors and publishers who use NovelRank every day to track their Amazon Sales Rank and promote their magnificent books! Over 12 books have already arrived, with others promised and on the way. I am very excited to get this started!

Without further adieu, the book giveaway kicks off with a wonderful paperback book, “MAGGIE: the dog who changed my life: A Story of Love”. The author, Dawn Kairns, has been using NovelRank for a long time, and I was really thrilled to have her book drop into my mailbox first. Here’s what one reviewer said about this 5 star book:

“This book is a deeply moving story of the powerful connection between the author and her soulmate dog Maggie… Maggie opens the author’s heart and teaches her about trusting her intuition and listening with her heart. Interspersed with well-researched information about pet health care and advice on how to deal with the grieving process following the loss of a pet, this book shows us that animals are so much more than just pets… ”
– Ingrid King

If you would like your chance of winning this book, add your email address to the form below. You’ll be notified by email if you are the winner, and you will also be opting into a follow-up email to let you know when the next book in the giveaway becomes available.

This giveaway is closed. Check out the current giveaway.

Share the Book Giveaway with Others:
Share or or http://www.novelrank.com/book-giveaway (will always be current)

The Rules
Any email address that is not valid will not be accepted. Any email to a temporary mailbox service (e.g. mailinator.com) will be disqualified and may be publicly mocked. Unless otherwise stated, only one book can be won. Multiple entries will not be accepted; don’t make me turn on duplicate protection. The winner will be drawn randomly no later than the 3rd of the following month and contacted via email to receive shipping information. Winners who fail to respond to the email within 72 hours will forfeit their win to another random winner.

For Authors: Getting Involved
For more information about donating your book to the book giveaway, check out this introductory announcement post on the book giveaway idea.

Authors: Donate your Novel for Monthly Promotion and Giveaway!

Girl Reading Antique Book (licensed) Let’s face it, authors are the biggest readers (we call it research) and love reading books as much or more than writing them. More importantly, authors are always looking for ways to promote their book to an attentive audience. With this in mind, and a touch of crazy, NovelRank would like to start doing a monthly book giveaway, supported by books donated by authors like you who track their books on NovelRank.

Update: August 2011

Due to overwhelming response, and a balance of author benefit and time cost, NovelRank is no discontinuing the giveaway program in 2011. Thanks for participating!

Why would NovelRank do this?

NovelRank should be more than a one-trick pony, as some of the unique blog posts have aspired to do. To that end, I would love to also share and promote author’s books in new and unique ways whenever possible. With some interest already from Rebecca Connell, Cami Checketts, Lisette Brodey, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, and Mike Dauplaise (with TitleTown Publishing), I think that this idea is ready to move forward.

What’s in it for me?

Free promotion of your book? Isn’t that what every author wants? Your book would be promoted to twitter, facebook, and the NovelRank blog, and all the while being adored by hundreds. On January 5th, NovelRank had ~100 unique visitors a day. On February 5th, this doubled to 200+ unique visitors. January 2010 had over 11,500 visits to the site. As you continue to spread the word, this will continue to grow.

Seems too good to be true; what does NovelRank risk?

Cold. Hard. Cash. Seriously, I’ll be paying out of my own pocket to package and ship (anywhere in the world) the winner their copy of the monthly giveaway book. I also have to store all the books authors send to me until their time comes.

Anything else?

Not really. Oh, one last thing: I’m actually a slow reader because I’m busy (guess with what), so I won’t be reading and reviewing every book before it is promoted. If you are looking for a review, I suggest LLBookReview.com.

Chart Amazon Book Sales: Tracking Books

I’ve been putting this off for too long, and finally took the initiative and got it done this morning in about 3 hours. You will now see a new Chart Type option when viewing your book on NovelRank: Book Sales. Book sales tracking has existed since NovelRank launched, but there was no way to see a chart or bar graph of the information, till now. Remember, these are still sales estimates, with accuracy decreasing for books selling more than 100 copies a month.

I have also updated the Download to Excel/CSV option so monthly Amazon sales estimates for the entire history of NovelRank tracking will be available. Better late than never. Here is another quick example with more domains present:

Finally, since I was in charting, I fixed a bug where you would see in the Domains drop-down menu all Amazon domains, even if your book was not tracked on that domain. That has been fixed, so only relevant domains will be displayed. Please hold your applause.