Smashwords, an online Ebook store for independent authors and their publishers, is launching a new affiliate program that will allow external sites to generate revenue by linking to Ebooks that are being sold on the Smashwords store.
Affiliate programs for bookstores are nothing new. Typically online publishers will link to a book and will get a cut of the proceeds if the store linked to makes a sale within a certain timeframe. But the emergence of Ebooks is changing the landscape. Amazon, which has built up its affiliate program for traditional books over the last decade, does not give affiliate publishers any portion of the purchase price if a visitor winds up buying an electronic book. Smashwords is looking to capitalize on this omission by offering web publishers an alternative.
The Smashwords affiliate program is offering commissions of 11% of the net selling price (the sale price less any PayPal fees) for all of its online books (authors can optionally opt out if they’d like). And the store is giving authors and publishers the ability to control how much of a commission they’d like to offer above that 11% – so an author could bump it up to 50% or 80% if they were willing to exchange revenue for increased exposure. You can find the full details of the program here.
Smashwords launched a year ago, and has grown to offer 1,300 Ebooks primarily from independent authors, though some small publishers are beginning to sign on as well. All of the content sold is DRM-free (you can read it on your computer, or devices like the Kindle) and authors receive 85% of the net proceeds of any Ebooks that they sell. Other players in this space include Fictionwise and Scribd, which just launched its online store, though neither of these offer an affiliate program.
The marketing of books is getting interesting and ebooks are adding flavor to it. But there are another facet of ebooks as well. We have ebooks available, however we do not have inexpensive ebook readers. And that is one of the major constraints in the growth of ebooks.
I accept the flexibility ebooks offers. One such case is converting the ebook format so that we can read this in out mobile device. Be it Blackberry, Windows Mobile or plain java phone.
Now it is right time to push for inexpensive ebook reader to public, which will boost the sell of books. And that is what every publisher wants.
Prem
ya not bad i’ll probably add it to my site
This is something the independent publishing space has been missing and I think it’s a great idea. Now eBook creators can stop inserting their own affiliate links into the books, and make money on their ideas instead.
They should do the same for video content.
That is a good deal. The business model is pretty much like that of the Amazon affiliates, except Smashwords gives a way for an author to offer a higher commission percentage than that is in the default. I am optimistic a new author would offer a higher percentage of commissions if his or her work somehow get exposure.
i have been into blogging for so many months but never got into affiliates .maybe this is opening the doors for me ?
and your blog is called make money easy home? lolvut?
You have probably overlooked the biggest player in this space, Clickbank, plus there is eJunkie, PayDotCom and many more.
Clickbank mostly sells those spammy ebooks on “how to make alot of money”. Granted, they do sell lots of them.
I thought Amazon provided affiliate commissions on Kindle book sales?
Apparently not – http://affiliat...dle-family.html:
“Please note that books formatted for kindle are not eligible to receive referral fees through the Associates program. Associates can earn referral fees on qualifying sales of the following Kindle products: Kindle reader sales (this includes Kindle and Kindle DX), Kindle magazine, newspaper, and blog subscriptions.”
Oddly enough, the Associates can build links to Kindle books … without any warning of this exclusion.
The books vs. subscriptions policy was the other way around, back in Nov. 2007: http://affiliat...10-on-amaz.html
What sucks about ebooks is that they’re easily reproducible. If just one person uploads the ebook somewhere, you can hunt it down via the pdf search engine.
that is a cool program. thanks for sharing. I will look into it.
Very interesting post. I’m always on the lookout for a new affiliate program. Plus I’m a huge ebook fan, this sounds like a great deal.
Look forward to receiving information on your program.