The Amazon Associate program allows anyone with an Amazon account to display ads for Amazon products—like books, for instance—on their websites and earn a commission of 4 – 15% of the total sale anytime one of their site visitors clicks through one of the Amazon ads.
That means that even if your site visitor doesn’t buy the specific item you’ve listed in your Associate ad, you still get a commission on anything else they buy while shopping on Amazon after clicking through your ad.
The minimum commission percentage you earn on each sale is 4% of the price at which the item sold, and it can go all the way up to 15% based on your total quantity of items sold via your associate links in any given month; read more about that at the Associates site (link provided later in this article). Signup is free and setting up the ads is easy.
The real beauty of this program for indie authors and small imprints is that you can set up Associate ads for your own books, and whenever you sell a copy via your Associate ad, you’ll get your author royalty as per usual plus your Amazon Associate commission. Publetarians have even more reason to cheer, because even if you don’t have a website of your own, you can set up Amazon Associate text-only ads right here on Publetariat in your user profile. Let’s get started!
First, you must have an Amazon customer account and have at least one book listed for sale on Amazon. Next, sign up for the Amazon Associates program, here. Once you’re signed up, login to your Associates account. You can use the same link as above to access the Associates home page – bookmark it for future use. Click on the Links & Banners tab. From there, click on Add Product Links Now.
On the Add Product Links page, you can look up your book by keyword, title, ASIN or ISBN.
A list of search results is returned. Click the Get Link button for the product you want in your ad.
On the Customize & Get HTML page, select “Text Only (basic display)”, and customize the Link Text if you wish. Changes you make are immediately reflected in the Preview at the right-hand side of the screen and the snippet of HTML code beneath.
When everything looks good, highlight and copy the HTML code snippet, then paste the block into Notepad or any other simple text editor program. Do not copy the Product Previews script, which appears beneath the HTML code snippet. Scripts are not supported in your user profile, but the text-only ad will be just fine.
Now, go to your Publetariat user profile (My Account link), click on the Edit tab, and from there click on the Writing link.
In the Writing area, scroll down to the appropriate content type for your book: Hard Copy for hard copy books, Electronic for ebooks and Kindle books, Audio for audiobooks and podcasts. Copy the HTML snippet from your text editor and paste it into the box, as shown, then save your changes.
Now click on the View tab of your profile and – presto! A clickable link for site visitors to buy your book on Amazon and give you an extra 2 – 15% commission in the process!
