Generating More Revenue for Book Authors Through an Amazon Affiliate Tag

It amazes me when I see a link from an author to their book on Amazon without attaching a personal affiliate tag. Sure, sometimes it’s hidden behind a shortened URL, but other times it is completely absent from the link. It’s critical to understand one thing:

Amazon Affiliate tags allow you to earn a minimum of 4% on all sales of your book through that link. On a $10 book that is 40 cents. Sell multiple books per month through that link and it can become 6.5%. In the UK the rate starts at 5%.

If you are a self-publishing author, it’s likely that a sale on Amazon is not generating as much revenue as a sale on the self-publisher’s webpage, but buyers buy where they choose, and sometimes Amazon offers a better deal (in price or shipping). So, it’s imperative you maximize your revenue while still offering the best options for your readers.

So how do I get started

Get a blog or website setup for your book. It’s easy and can be free. You can setup a blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com completely for free. You can get more instructions in an article on The Creative Penn, “How do I setup my own blog?“. If you are more technical or want some more fine-tuned control, you can setup your own dedicated website on a shared hosting site like Dreamhost for less than $10 per month. Dreamhost offers a one-click WordPress blog install and even has web hosting coupon codes available to save you $50.

Getting your affiliate code

The next step is to get signed up for the affiliate program on Amazon, starting with the Amazon.com Affiliate Program website. The website will walk you through everything and provide you with a code that ends in -20 (for the US region). It will also unlock a status bar when you browse amazon that allows you to easily create a link to your book that includes your affiliate code. However, to maximize the benefit for your readers and for your revenue, you need to also setup your affiliate code from Amazon Canada Associates and Amazon UK Associates.

How do I get paid?

If you’re located in the US, Amazon US will pay you via Direct Deposit or Amazon Gift Card. Canada and the UK will mail you a check once you have earned over $50 Canadian or £100 British Pounds. Be advised that you will need to provide your social security number to Amazon so they can provide payment to you.

What’s the best way to ‘sell’ the book on your blog or website?

Put up a cover image of your book along with your title and a brief description. Create a dedicated page for purchasing the book. Provide links with current prices (and any coupon codes!) to numerous sites so your readers can shop at their preferred vendor. Make sure your links are built with your affiliate tag with the help of the affiliate websites so you can get your small percentage on the sale. Remember, if you only sell 1 book it won’t matter, but selling 1000 will suddenly mean $65 or more in your pocket. Here’s an example book purchase page on a dedicated website.

Why should I bother making an author or book blog?

Control your destiny, market your own book. It’s critical that whether you self-publish or have the promotional arm of a publishing company that you contribute to the marketing efforts by making you and your book visible on the web. Allow readers to find your book, understand its contents, get a personal connection to you the author, and even preview the book through Google Book Search or BookBuzzr (more info on this in a later post). Anything you can to make your book more present on the web and you as an author more visible can only better your future as a writer and increase your book’s sales.
Don’t take my word for it, check out what The Creative Penn has to say in 10 reasons to blog.

Image photo credit of Amagill: Flickr, Creative Commons – Attribution.

Twitter Contest – Get your book Featured on NovelRank

NovelRank features up to 6 books prominently throughout the website. Till now, the book choices have been completely arbitrary by myself, but I want to give promoters of NovelRank the opportunity to get their book featured! In order of the most visits, the following pages are available:

So what do I have to do?

It’s pretty simple actually, here are the steps:
1. Get your book’s link on NovelRank.com
2. Login to Twitter
3. Tweet the following phrase:
Tracking my book’s sales rank completely for free @novelrank http://this.is.your.link/
Make sure you change the link to your book!

Here is an example tweet:

Tracking my book’s sales rank completely for free @novelrank http://novelrank.com/title/php-reference-paperback

Looking forward to promoting fellow authors soon! Contest closes on December 11th so hurry!

Update 12/12/09
Congratulations to the winners: @Charlotte_Stein @meghanwier @camichecketts @sommer_marsden

Book Sales Rank – Understanding the Basics

The day has finally arrived and your book has a sales rank on Amazon. Great! Now what? Sure, maybe you start by tracking the book across Amazon, but what does it all mean? What if your book is on Amazon.com but doesn’t have a sales rank? Here are some basic concepts to help you understand more about what a book’s sales rank really means.

Your book is on Amazon but does not have a sales rank listed.

Amazon has decided that your book may generate sales eventually on that particular domain and has permission from the publisher to sell the book globally. However, if the sales rank is not present, it means that nobody has ever purchased a copy of that book. Someone may in the future, but right now your book’s sales rank is not listed.

My book’s sales rank is really high on Amazon.com! In the millions!

Congratulations, someone bought your book, once, a long time ago. For instance, this pre-order only for dummies book has a sales rank of 4+ million! In the last 2 months, it’s lost 300,000 ranks. If your sales rank was 1,000,000 it would lose more ranking a bit faster, but it’s been a while. Now let’s look at one with a bit more history, “Polynesian Interconnections“. In the last 6 months, it has lost 4.4 million positions in sales rank.
It loses ~1 million rankings over 15 days until it starts to level off and slowdown around 3.5 million. Thus, if you haven’t sold a book in a month, it’s likely you will be in the millions for your book’s sales rank.

Let’s pretend you sold one book a day, every day…

Your sales rank would stay pretty darn steady! You would have a sales rank between 50,000 and 150,000 most likely and it would constantly be going up and down. Here is a book that sold 24 copies in October of 2009, “The Production’s Assistants Pocket Handbook“. While it wasn’t 1 copy an hour, you can see the pattern. The takeaway is that in 24 hours, your sales rank will climb back to its pre-book sale sales rank.

Your book has a sales rank of 400 and it holds steady at 400.

You sold 2 books each hour approximately, congrats (I hate you, in a jealous way)! When you are in the top 200, 300, 400, etc. your book’s sales rank should drop about 14% if you didn’t sell a book. If you sell 1 book, it drops 7%. If you held steady, you sold 2 books! Seeing a pattern? This gets much more complicated the better the sales rank (lower number), and less complicated when you are above a sales rank of 1000.

I sold 1 book every hour…

On some estimates, you would be averaging a sales rank of 100. This is according to Nimble Book’s Power Law formula. That data is based on 2006 data. You may also have a sales rank around 300, just like “The Game” by Neil Strauss. It’s tricky, and personally, I’m still tweaking the formulas as more data is being collected.

Your book is in the top 50.

I don’t even want to talk about it. You’re doing fantastic, go out to dinner at a nice restaurant… oh, and donate to help support NovelRank (It’s in the bottom right, below ‘Stay Informed’)!

What about the other domains, like Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de?

Amazon.co.uk is a pretty popular site (so is Amazon.ca), but they have less inventory, so everything is scaled down. Amazon Germany, France, and Japan are even lower in inventory, so it scales down even further.

Final Thoughts on Book Sales Rank

Staying below 7 digits of sales rank is a good idea
A book a day keeps the 200,000’s away
Sales Rank overall is lower in all other domains besides Amazon.com
It’s even lower and less variable in Germany, France, and Japan
NovelRank is awesome

Look for some more research in the future!

NovelRank improvements through the rest of 2009

Being in the middle of November, a month filled with novel writing for NaNoWriMo, Thanksgiving (U.S. holiday), and a trip to Orlando, FL to work a conference and visit old friends, NovelRank development will take a back seat for a little while. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any goals for NovelRank development before the end of 2009. In no particular order:

Flip sales rank chart so that lower numbers are higher
~~Add charts for book sales (bar graphs)~~ Done!
~~Add book sales data via CSV spreadsheet download~~ Done!
~~Add RSS feeds for individual domains~~ Done!
~~Add a second URL for accessing books in the format: …com/title/name-of-book~~ Done!
~~Provide the first of many analysis/research articles about books by self-publishing authors available on Amazon.com and their specific self-publishing publishers~~ Done!

It’s not an exhaustive list, for sure, but there is a bit of work involved. Luckily, the foundations have already been built, this just adds more depth to the features currently available. If you have a desire to keep me motivated, feel free to tell 3 friends about NovelRank, or post about it on your blog, forums for authors that you visit, or on Twitter and Facebook.