Do you want to earn more money through something you’re already doing?
Seems like a silly question with an easy answer, but unfortunately not a lot of authors realize it’s actually possible – and super simple. If you’re selling books through Amazon, or iBooks, and marketing those books through your site or social media, you can sign up for Amazon’s Associate Program and the iTunes (and iBooks) Affiliate Programs to earn some extra cash. Here’s how it works:
Both Amazon and Apple love when you send people to their storefronts to purchase items because they make money off anything that is sold in their stores (as you know from listing your books). The cool thing is that if you help with that transaction by forwarding people to their stores, you get a “finder’s fee” of sorts – even if the item you send is something you’re personally selling. By signing up for their respective affiliate programs, you can then create links with your referral ID so that if anyone purchases anything in their stores after clicking your link, you get credit for that sale.
To take this a step further, if your readers also purchase something else at the same time as your book (or purchase something else instead of your book, after entering their stores from your links), you’ll get credit for that sale too. So if you link your $0.99 Kindle book, and someone also decides to by a flat screen TV at the same time as your book, guess what? You get credit for the TV too. Pretty cool, eh?
One thing to note is that Amazon has separate storefronts per country/region. The good news is that you can sign up for each to make sure you get money from your international readers as well. There are solutions out there (warning: shameless self promotion here) like my company GeoRiot that automatically “globalize” your links and your affiliate parameters for you to help with making sure your users end up in the correct spot, so you can kick back and watch the dough roll in.
Both iTunes and Amazon’s programs are absolutely free to sign up for, and just require you to fill out an application. There are guides that you can use to sign up for Amazon and iTunes (iBooks) stores which should help with the process, but my team and I offer free support should you run into any issues along the way. Just drop us a line and we’re all ears.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up, and thank me later.
