In a disturbing bit of news, it seems that Amazon has shut down the accounts of a few eBook sites and individual authors without warning or explanation. Some speculate that is because those sites are in competition with the new Goodreads features, others that this was part of a crackdown on link mining. Nate Hoffelder at the Digital Reader tells us what he knows about the situation.
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Amazon Lowers the Boom on Discount eBook Sites
15 June, 2016
by Nate Hoffelder
Here is a cute kitten to help you feel better.
When Amazon-owned Goodreads launched its discount ebook service last month, I wondered whether Amazon would find reasons to prune back its competition.
The first to lose its affiliate status with Amazon was Fussy Librarian, which went under the axe the week before Goodreads announced. At the time it looked like that was an isolated incident, but now it has been followed by two more sites, Pixel of Ink and eReaderIQ.
Fussy Librarian continues to operate, but the fate of the other sites is less certain.
Pixel of Ink announced today that they have shut down. They didn’t give a specific reason, but did say that “due to changes in the eBook world and in our life, it is time for us to move on, and Pixel of Ink must now end”.
I’m still following up with PoI, so I can’t tell you the specific reason for its closure, but I do know that it wasn’t the only casualty. eReaderIQ has made a similar, albeit more detailed announcement today. They’ve posted a notice on their homepage to the effect that:
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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.
This is a very important read for all authors, but especially those that publish through Kindle Unlimited 2.0. We need to give this problem as much attention as possible so that Amazon will hopefully do something to fix this issue. It is difficult enough to find readers and compete with other legitimate titles, but now scammers are basically cheating you out of profits. Ann Christy (Navy Commander by Day, Secret Writer by Night!) has a really good in depth post with all the details on her website. How do you think Amazon could solve this problem?
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KU Scammers on Amazon – What’s Going On?
April 15, 2016
ByAnn Christy
This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I’m putting it here for anyone.
Not many readers (who aren’t also authors) know any details about this, though readers sure are noticing the impacts of the scams. I see threads or posts all over the place about the difficulty readers are having with simply browsing on Amazon to find their next good read.
Discoverability is an author’s word when it comes to books…it’s the holy grail of the indie. If you say it in the tones of a voice-over in a serious movie, you can almost hear the slight echo: What is the secret of the grail (discoverability)?
Now, it is also a reader problem. The scammers have made finding books too difficult. Readers are going back to older methods for finding books or even worse, simply writing off any new author out of hand unless the recommendation comes from an actual person on Goodreads or forum or the like.
For those who don’t know, to be in KU, a book can’t be available at any other vendor. Amazon exclusive. The bonus is that it gets slightly better visibility simply because it can be a “recommendation” to KU browsers. Books not in KU are often not shown to them unless they are bigger names.
On to the issue of the scammers and what’s really going on…
KU pays authors based on a communal pot. It is not based on the price of the book. The amount KU subscribers pay is then divided between all authors based on how many of their pages were read by users.
So, it’s a pie. Some get a bigger slice, some a smaller, but the pie is finite and must be shared. So, if scammers take out of that pie, it comes directly out of the pockets of the others. That’s important.
KU 2.0 (which is what we’re in now) pays by the page. Not pages in books, but pages reader reads.
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You may have used Amazon’s previewer tool in the past, where you were able to embed a preview link on your website or blog post. If you had, you will have realized that the widget was starting to show it’s age, didn’t always work the way it was suppose to, or at all.
That has all changed.
Amazon has updated its Kindle Instant Preview tool and it is wonderful. See below for a sample.
There is so much to love. The look has been updated and the embed is mobile ready. Now, people can easily share your book! Add your Amazon affiliate ID during set up, and when they do share your preview, your affiliate link goes along with it. All while on your author site.
At the top of the embed you have the “Buy” button which opens a new window on Amazon to purchase the book. The “Share” button allows people to either email your preview, post on Facebook, or tweet on Twitter. They even have a short link that can be shared anywhere, which includes your affiliate link. The bottom section lets you know how much of the free sample is left and will allow you to adjust the font size. Very helpful for small screens! On computer or tablets, if you click on the “Preview” link, the sample is opened as the same size as the image. However, if you click on the text, it will toggle the bottom options and allow you to view the sample full screen.
The best part is that Amazon has made this so very easy to set up. First find your book on Amazon. On the right side of the screen, by the share buttons is the <embed> link. Click on that embed link and customize. You have a choice to create a link that will go to the opened preview pane on Amazon, or the ability to “Embed on your site (HTML)”. Here is where you add your Amazon affiliate tag, and make other customizations such as the size of the image.
Not every book may be available, but so far I haven’t found one that isn’t. If you are already selling the your book(s) directly yourself, this may not be an ideal option for you. But for many authors, the pain of having to deal with setting up a store to deal with purchases makes this a wonderful alternative. See Amazon for more details.
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Brent Underwood took a picture of his foot and created a “best selling” book out of it. He gives the details over at Observer.com. In the post Categories, keywords, Amazon, and you. How to get the most out of your choices. I discussed the way to optimize your choices on Amazon to get your book the best rankings. Brent obviously took this to an extreme and managed to get his foot a best selling listing. While this tactic did work, I have to disagree with Brent a little bit. He got three friends to buy and rate his book, and there is nothing stopping anyone else from doing this, but readers are smarter than that. I doubt that he could make any sales or legitimately rank. Yes there are bad people out there trying to scam the system, but Amazon keeps on knocking them down and readers are pickier that that. Would we be better off as a whole if people didn’t try and game the system? Yes. Should people ignore the “best selling” marker? No, it is just one more piece of information, among a bunch of other pieces of information that readers use to choose titles. Read the article and let us know what you think.
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Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes.
I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.”
This isn’t about how The New York Times list is biased (though it is). This isn’t about how authors buy their way onto various national best-seller lists by buying their own books in bulk (though they do). No, this is about the far more insidious title of “Amazon Bestseller”—and how it’s complete and utter nonsense.
Here’s what happened in the book industry over the last few years: As Amazon has become the big dog in the book world, the “Amazon Bestseller” status has come to be synonymous with being an actual bestseller. This is not true, and I can prove it.
*****
Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything.
How many copies did I need to sell be able to call up my mother and celebrate my newfound authorial achievements? Three. Yes, a total of three copies to become a best-selling author. And I bought two of those copies myself!
The reason people aspire to call themselves “bestselling author” is because it dramatically increases your credibility and “personal brand.” It can establish you as a thought leader. You’re able to show that you not only wrote a book, but that the market has judged it to be better than other books out there. It’s a status symbol, one of that cashes in on the prestige of one of man’s oldest past-times. At last, I had acquired this coveted title for myself.
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Part of uploading your title to the Amazon marketplace includes filling out a lot of “metadata”, you know, all that information you have to input into the fields for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to accept your book. Each bit of information can help get your title in front of viewers and boost sales. So it is important to make careful choices. Today we will focus on Categories and Keywords.
Readers use categories and keywords to find new books. The goal is to figure out what your ideal reader will do to search for new titles. This might seem like an easy task at first, because your book might be clearly romance, science fiction, or some other genre. By doing a little research and tweaking your choices, you will be able to get your book in front of more people and improve your ranking.
This doesn’t mean you should go for keywords or categories that don’t match your story in an effort to boost your ranking. People will complain and Amazon takes this very seriously. You can get blacklisted. Carefully matching your keywords and categories to your story allows you to get your story in front of an audience who is most likely to appreciate your work and become true fans. Everyone wins!
Categories
Amazon Categories
Categories are basically the genre of your book. Amazon allows you to have two categories, which you should take advantage of. For your research, start off by going to Amazon Kindle Books, and on the left hand side you will see a list of categories.
Select the one that you think matches your book closely. For example let’s select the “romance” category. Now you will find two good pieces of information. At the top left side you will see “Popular Romance Categories”. Continue down and you will see that the original category of “romance” has expanded to many subcategories.
Explore the different subcategories. Again you are looking for the best fit. So if your hot new romance is about two military people who find love in a foxhole, you really are not going to be a good fit for paranormal romance. Unless one of those foxhole loving people also transforms into a werewolf.
Another way of finding categories for your book is to browse until you find a similar book in terms of subject matter and genre. Scroll down the book details page until you find “Look for Similar Items by Category”
Remember you have two instances for categories, so keep that in mind. In the example above, one choice could be military, another paranormal. You want to dig deep. If I click on the “Military” category, there are no more subcategories. The “Paranormal” category does have a bunch of subcategories, which makes it a better choice.
You want to go as deep as you can, and still have the categories makes sense. So try and pick the most specific subcategory you can. The cool thing about finding a more specific category is that you will be searchable in all the parent categories. So “Romance -> Paranormal -> Werewolves & Shifters” will show your book if someone searches for “Romance”, “Paranormal”, or “Werewolves & Shifters”.
Then you can head on over to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and start entering the two categories that you want for you book along with your other information. Depending on what you choose, you might find that there are some categories on the main Amazon site that you don’t see available on KDP. That is because some categories require you to enter keywords to be available.
To list your title in certain sub-categories for Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, you’ll need to add Search Keywords in addition to the categories you choose for your title. Click a category below to see the keyword requirements.
By finding a good fit and utilizing more specific categories with special keywords, your can place your book in categories that have less overall titles. Why is that important? Because a category with less total titles means the odds of your book becoming a top 100 listing increases. This increases the chances of how many people will see it and Amazon promoting your title.
Romance subcategories
You can tell how many books are in a category, by typing the category in the search bar. Make sure you are searching in the Kindle store, under the title category, for our example “romance”. This way you can see how many books are being sold under each sub-subcategory.
So in our example above, if one soldier was a werewolf but the other was an angel trapped in soldier’s body, then you could choose “Romance -> Paranormal ->Angels”. Then your book would show up under “Romance”, “Paranormal”, and “Angels” and your book is only competing with 3,102 other titles. If you choose “Romance -> Paranormal ->Werewolves & Shifters” then you would be competing against 13,606 other titles. Both searches fit your book, but the “Angels” subcategory allows you the best option for a top 100 listing.
Keywords
Keywords are what a reader might type into the search bar to find your book. The goal with categories was to find the most specific category type with the least of amount of titles. The goal with keywords is to find the broadest.
You are allowed seven keywords, separated by commas. But did you know you can also use phrases? The total number of characters allowed in the keyword text field must be 399 characters or less. Keywords are hidden, so the only people who know what keywords you pick are Amazon and you. This makes it a little more difficult to find out what others are using.
The first step is to brainstorm. What main words or phrases would you use to find your book? Try and step into your ideal customer’s head and ask what would they type to find your book?
Some other ways to brainstorm keywords per Amazon
Useful keyword types
Setting (Colonial America)
Character types (single dad, veteran)
Character roles (strong female lead)
Plot themes (coming of age, forgiveness)
Story tone (dystopian, feel-good)
If you are using a phrase make sure to use a natural order. “Sword & Sorcery” is a common phrase but “Sorcery & Sword” is not. Again you are trying to guess what people might type to find your book, so use common phrases that are well established.
When you think you have a good list, go test your keywords one at a time on Amazon, in the Kindle store, and look at the results. With keywords you want more results, the higher the number the better. If your keyword doesn’t have a lot of results, then that means it isn’t a word that users type very often.
As you start to type in your keywords, watch to see what auto-prompts Amazon suggests. Those auto-prompts are the ones that people use most often to search Amazon. For example, when I type in the letter “p”, one of the auto-prompt suggestions is the phrase “paranormal romance.” You want to make sure though that you don’t waste a keyword by using one of your category selections.
Also don’t waste keywords on information or metadata you have already entered, such as your title or any of your information that you have entered on any of the other KDP form fields. Don’t worry about punctuation either, Amazon’s got you covered.
Also you can’t use as keywords
Reference to other authors
Reference to books by other authors
Reference to sales rank (e.g., “bestselling”)
Reference to advertisements or promotions (e.g., “free”)
Reference to anything that is unrelated to your book’s content
You can always go back and change your categories and keywords after you have given them a chance to work. By doing your research and trying out different options, you can optimize your chances of getting your book in front of more readers who are looking for you.
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Wow, over on The Digital Reader, Nate Hoffelder comes out swinging against The Writer’s Workshop article Darth Amazon – or – Why Amazon Is An Evil Sith Lord, And Apple Is Luke Skywalker by David Lieder. You know what? Nate is correct. Both Amazon and Apple are big companies and suffer from the issues that plague big companies. But every author I have ever worked with has had the same consistent results. They get the majority of their exposure and sales from Amazon, with the iBook store a far second. Not only that, but to even upload your manuscript to the iBook store you must own a mac, and not a cheap one. (Is there even such a thing as a cheap mac?) It is also very difficult to get exposure on the iBook store unless you are already a very well established author. What are your thoughts or experiences?
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Amazon Is An Evil Sith Lord, and Other Dumb Arguments Against Doing Business With Amazon
With Authors United’s debate recitation coming up on Wednesday, this week promises to have an excess of “evil Amazon is evil” whining, and David Lieder is getting a head start on the competition.
Writing over at The Writer’s Workshop, this David Streitfeld wannabe reaches into the depths of his ADS* to argue that authors should not not deal directly with Amazon.
So I want to argue that authors should avoid Amazon Kindle, ACX and Create Space, and explain why I recommend that authors use other distributors, except for allowing your books to trickle back onto the Amazon platform after the fact (from another propagator, such as Smashwords, Ingram-Spark, even Book Baby). I want to explain why I teach authors to boycott Amazon ACX (audiobook production) and to replace Create Space with the much better choice of Ingram-Spark (which has print books available to authors at about half the price of Create Space).
Apparently Lieder is a believer in what I am calling the condom theory, which goes something like this: So long as you wear a condom, you’re not technically having sex with your partner. (Yes, it is a dumb theory, but it’s his theory and his arguments, not mine).
To put it another way, this pint-sized Melville House thinks it is okay to do business with what he sees as evil so long as you have an intermediary in between. In his mind, you’re not dealing with the devil if you use a distributor who deals with the devil on your behalf.
I could explain why Lieder’s arguments are wrong, and point out the factual errors, half-truths, and errant nonsense in his piece, but I have already lost several brain cells reading that piece and I do not wish to expend any additional brain cells arguing the point.
So let me simply list a few:
Discredited Argument: The fact that some Amazon ex-employees say it’s common for employees to break down crying because the pressures and attitudes across the board as a company are oppressive.
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Labeled more a vanity press than real self publishing service provider, Author Solutions is controversial and faced a few lawsuits from unhappy authors. Enough so that Penguin Random House is distancing itself and basically ceding the self-publishing territory to Amazon. While I think Amazon provides some great services for indie authors, competition is healthy. I guess the problem is that Author Solutions wasn’t really competition as it was accused of making money off of authors, instead with authors. Please let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments, or even if you have some insight. I think we would all love to hear about anyone’s experiences with Author Solutions good or bad.
Benedicte Page and Katherine Cowdrey give us the details on the BookSeller site.
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PRH sells Author Solutions
Penguin Random House has sold its controversial self-publishing division Author Solutions.
Author Solutions, acquired by Pearson in 2012 for $116m (£74m), for integration into Penguin, was sold to an affiliate of Najafi Companies, an Arizona-based private investment firm, on 31st December. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In a note to staff, PRH c.e.o. Markus Dohle said: “We thank the entire Author Solutions team for their hard work and dedication during their time as part of Penguin Random House, and we wish them all the best and much success under the new ownership. With this sale, we reaffirm our focus on consumer book publishing through our 250 imprints worldwide, and our commitment to connecting our authors and their works to readers everywhere.”
The acquisition of Author Solutions by Pearson/Penguin was always controversial, with then Penguin c.e.o. John Makinson having to defend the company against accusations that the buy would muddy its brand image.
Makinson said at the time: “This acquisition will allow Penguin to participate fully in perhaps the fastest-growing area of the publishing economy and gain skills in customer acquisition and data analytics that will be vital to our future.”
Author Solutions continued to be run as a separate business, with Penguin staffer Andrew Phillips transferred to run it in place of former c.e.o. Kevin Weiss in 2013. Phillips confirmed that he would remain as chief executive of AS.
The self-publishing division was the subject of a lawsuit in the US, which was settled out of court last August, during which the business faced accusations from plaintiff authors of seeking to make money from authors, rather than for authors. Author Solutions lawyers maintained the suit was “a misguided attempt to make a federal class action out of a series of gripes”.
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Amazon won’t allow paid book reviews, and they won’t let you review your friend’s books, but as the Seattle Times tells us, anything else goes.
Jay Greene brings us the sad tale of conspiracy nuts running rampant in the review sections at Amazon.com.
Most book authors know they need to endure critics, even comments that may be malicious and personal.
But the venom that runs through more than three dozen reviews on Amazon.com of Scarlett Lewis’ latest book are particularly scathing.
“This Scarlet Lewis person is a real sick human being,” writes one reviewer named Kevin. “Scarlett Lewis is a fraud and a sellout to all of humanity,” writes another, anonymously. “Scarlett Lewis is a lying traitor,” writes a reviewer named David Weiss.Those reviews might suggest that Lewis is a polemic politician, treasonous spy or scurrilous financier. She’s none of these. Lewis is the mother of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old boy who was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago.
She wrote “Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness” to describe her journey after the massacre and help others choose love and forgiveness instead of anger and resentment in their darkest moments.
The reviewers cited above were inspired to post bogus reviews by their belief that Sandy Hook was a hoax, but not all review spammers share that motivation nor is this problem unique to Amazon.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, targets freelancers working for Fiverr, an online website that offers services like video editing and graphic design for cheap.
As for the name of the defendants? Well, Amazon doesn’t really know. They’re all listed as John Does in the suit.
And instead of cheap services, Amazon claims these John Does are deceptively selling online reviews for as little as $5.
The company says it’s suing the individuals for “tarnishing Amazon’s brand for their own profit and the profit of a handful of dishonest sellers and manufacturers.”
Barry Eisler here. Joe, thanks as always for the guest slot. I was going to mock this Wall Street Journal article somewhere, and there’s no better place than A Newbie’s Guide for that…
I just want to make sure I’m the first to congratulate the Wall Street Journal on its shocking discovery of a correlation between higher prices and lower demand. And, while I’m no economist, I’d like to humbly propose that the WSJ call its discovery something like, “The Demand Curve.” If this doesn’t win the newspaper a Pulitzer, I have one more suggestion: an even more radically new article on how a round object fastened to an axle can work as something called…a wheel.
Apologies for the snark, but where else but in publishing could a notion like “higher prices lead to lower revenues” even be controversial, let alone newsworthy? But the publishing industry is notoriously special, and Joe has been beating this drum for years. Five years ago, he wrote:
Naturally, people would rather pay less for something than more. And in a digital world, like we’re rapidly becoming, consumers have shown consistently in other forms of media that they place less value on downloads than on physical products.
When companies price digital content too high, consumers respond by pirating that content. That’s the ultimate in “devaluing.”
Barnes and Noble has lost over one billion dollars on trying to make the Nook brand into a viable business model. Since 2009 the largest bookseller in the US has gone through two CEO’s and has just announced they have hired their third, Ron Boire, who starts this September. It looks like the Nook brand is in seriously jeopardy.
Boire—who has only been CEO of the faltering Sears Canada department store chain for the last ten months has kept the store in business by closing retail locations and axing thousands of job will be the new CEO of Barnes and Noble. His number one priority with the company is to stem the blood loss from the ailing Nook division. Last week Barnes and Noble announced that Nook hardware and e-books sales fell 40% in the three months ending May 2 and declined 48% year on year.
Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?
Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us
What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and indie authors on imprints and small presses with money riding on book campaigns were being drowned in self-publishers categorizing their books too loosely in ways to get seen – especially in the erotica genre. I talked about this as being a problem I foresaw Amazon reacting to, and was only two pitchforks from being burned at the stake for mentioning anything that could cause a vibration through the “freedom for writers everywhere” faction.
But hey, it happened as predicted, and very quietly, too.
While some authors were releasing up to eight books of erotica at the same time to flood book charts with their ‘brand,’ and categorized them as “Westerns” when their lover boy rode a horse, or “Crime Fiction” when the book featured a gangster type doing the bedding, Amazon was flooded with books that used to stay in their own little (adult) area – it became nigh impossible to even enter the YA Sci-Fi section of Amazon without a bevvy of bare chests and chiffoned thighs gracing the listing pages.
So the greedy few seemed to have spoiled it for the rest of us. Well done, kids!
My book, Indiscretion, has been on Amazon’s Kindle Scout program for an entire week as of today. It’s been on and off the “Hot and Trending” list, which I guess is natural. This is measured by how many people read the sample and nominate my book during a thirty-day period. I’ve done some promotion, but there’s a fine line between promo and overkill. I try to be cognizant of where that line is. That said, self-promotion has never been an easy fit for me.
So what is Kindle Scout, you ask? This is from the Kindle Scout website:
“Kindle Scout is reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books. It’s a place where readers help decide if a book gets published. Selected books will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50% eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”
Bloggers have debated the pros and cons of the program. From my point of view, the answer depends on where you are in the publishing world. I’ve self-published seven books with Amazon. The difference with Kindle Scout, besides the nice advance, unheard of for an indie writer, is the strength of Amazon’s marketing that I wouldn’t get otherwise.
We hear a lot about Amazon, the new giant in the playground. But Amazon may actually be the least of the industry’s problems, because they at least play by rules we recognise. There are plenty of other giants out there who are playing entirely different games – but who may still stomp all over our playground. The question is, what do we do about them?
The publishing industry feels under threat from a lot of places these days. And the most commonly mentioned cause of this fear is surely Amazon. Starting off as just another book retailer, Amazon has grown hugely and very cleverly to become a true global giant.
Amazon seems to be the kid everyone’s afraid of – bigger, stronger, and not afraid to use its muscle to get what it wants!
Playing by the rules
However, Amazon is still playing in our playground, basically working with the same rules publishing companies are used to – getting books to customers more effectively and more cheaply than ever before. This is a game that publishers understand and play all the time. And we can see this by the way that publishers and Amazon are always talking about this or that, arguing about a particular situation and coming to new agreements.
The problem, it seems to me, is that Amazon isn’t actually what publishers should be most worried about. We fear Amazon, I think, because we understand it pretty well and so can predict clearly what effect its actions are going to have on us.
A different game
The true danger may not be Amazon but other giants who are playing entirely different games. Companies like Google and Facebook, who use content (including content from publishers) as part of their business but who don’t really care much about that content because their real business is selling advertising.
Amazon.com sued three websites it accuses of purveying fake reviews, demanding that they stop the practice.
The suit alleges that the glowing product evaluations they provide deceive consumers and harm the sellers on Amazon’s site who don’t game the system.
The suit, filed Wednesday in King County Superior Court, accuses Jay Gentile of California and websites that operate as buyamazonreviews.com and buyazonreviews.com, among others, of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington Consumer Protection Act.
“While small in number, these reviews threaten to undermine the trust that customers, and the vast majority of sellers and manufacturers, place in Amazon, thereby tarnishing Amazon’s brand,” according to the suit.
The site buyazonreviews.com, which the suit claims is run by Gentile, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Mark Collins, the owner of buyamazonreviews.com, denied Amazon’s claims.
This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I’m putting it here for anyone.
There is so much to love. The look has been updated and the embed is mobile ready. Now, people can easily share your book! Add your Amazon affiliate ID during set up, and when they do share your preview, your affiliate link goes along with it. All while on your author site.
The best part is that Amazon has made this so very easy to set up. First find your book on Amazon. On the right side of the screen, by the share buttons is the <embed> link. Click on that embed link and customize. You have a choice to create a link that will go to the opened preview pane on Amazon, or the ability to “Embed on your site (HTML)”. Here is where you add your Amazon affiliate tag, and make other customizations such as the size of the image.
I would like to tell you about the biggest lie in book publishing. It appears in the biographies and social media profiles of almost every working “author” today. It’s the word “best seller.”
Part of uploading your title to the Amazon marketplace includes filling out a lot of “metadata”, you know, all that information you have to input into the fields for Amazon 
With 
Penguin Random House has sold its controversial self-publishing division Author Solutions.