I just published my first book . And as a member of the Amazon affiliate program, I put an Amazon widget in the book site to get the referral rates by selling my own book.
The “funny” thing is that the referral rate is 6% of the book price which is more than what I get as royalty. Sure, I’m cheating a little bit with the numbers (you get the 6% referral rate in Amazon only after you sell more than 6 copies during the month and the royalties are so low because the book has three authors) but still I find the economics of the book business quite strange.
(and yes, we could have self-published the book to get a higher percentage of benefits, but there were good reasons to go with a known editorial, I´ll elaborate on this in a future post on the my research rants blog).
If you liked this post, you should also follow my thoughts on twitter about software development or web design, wordpress and social media .
The whole remuneration structure of writing and selling books is broken. Broken, and rather reminiscent of a sausage factory. A pig, after all, has arguably the most important input into a sausage, but is not remunerated for its contribution.
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Referrals from Amazon Gift Certificates will earn a flat 6% referral rate. Affiliates will still earn the 6% referral fee even if visitors click on a product they are promoting and buy a Gift Certificate instead.
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