Amazon drops Kindle books from its Affiliate program

[fugazied]

I'd be interested in seeing the profit splits for the average e-book.

The publisher cost is probably pretty high and Amazon is super keen to keep the kindle ebooks cheap so the kindle sells well. That means super low profit margins and to keep the ebooks sales continuing they had to cut the affiliates?

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Is it? If, as reported, Amazon actually make a loss on "best sellers", do they actually want to sell them? The more they sell, the more they lose...

True. At the very least they don't want to increase the loss.

Another thing that strikes me is that if authors on average make about $0.80 per book sold which I recently read from a poster on this site, it would be rather galling if folks were getting more than the actual author of the book for merely linking to it on a website. I doubt this factored into Amazon's decision, but it would bother me nonetheless. If the program were still in place, I would encourage any author to join the affiliate program and double their royalty.

[pdurrant]

I don't know if the big publishers have cut a better deal, but for anyone else, Amazon takes 65% of the list price.

Originally Posted by fugazied

I'd be interested in seeing the profit splits for the average e-book.

The publisher cost is probably pretty high and Amazon is super keen to keep the kindle ebooks cheap so the kindle sells well. That means super low profit margins and to keep the ebooks sales continuing they had to cut the affiliates?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I don't know if the big publishers have cut a better deal, but for anyone else, Amazon takes 65% of the list price.

That's for "personal" publishing. The big publishers unquestionable get a much better deal than that.

[cowgirl73]

Thanks for confirming this was the case. I just stopped getting paid for the Kindle books and read the terms this morning. I did not see any notice to the change either. Oh, well maybe it is time to work on a new website.

eRead World is my blog

[Mike L]

By the way ... although Kindle books now get a zero percentage commission, I wonder if they still contribute to the monthly payment thresholds. In other words, if you "sell" a Kindle book in a given month, will that help you reach the next percentage step for that month?

The reason I ask is that I have "sold" two Kindle books this month, and the "Total items shipped" figure in my monthly report includes those two books. Just a thought.

[koland]

So far, yes they count. However, they can stop at any time (and go back and recalculate your earnings up to two months prior - I lost two months of referral fees when this hit).

Karen
http://booksontheknob.blogspot.com/