Quote:
Originally Posted by koland
There are things Amazon could do to eliminate the issue. Such as, for example, just expiring someones tracking cookie/session if they buy a free book. I think all the book bloggers would be satisfied with that. We'd lose a little income, but not the entire amount (and Amazon would see more clearly that free sales referrals are not making up the bulk of our earnings; I'm not sure, though, that that is the case for the mega-freebie-feed/email sites).
|
I would love this solution personally, and I suggested it on the affiliate forums. Make the "free book" set cookies either session based or with a much lower expiration time (i.e. 4 hours). It is rather easy to implement technically. Probably far easier than the development of the reporting tools they are making.
Quote:
Originally Posted by koland
There are places now using/selling "post-generation" scripts, that can automate thousands of posts a day, to fill up feeds or emails, pointing at the free books (plus the sites many of use are familiar with).
|
Yeah, I can think of a few sites like this, exercising no editorial control. I get why amazon would want to shut them down. In my experience, readers prefer sites that exert some editorial control, rather than listing quantity without regard for quality.
I'm reworking my own site now, and will rarely if ever link to any free promotion books from now on. I'm really sorry for the authors, who signed upf or select because of the free promo days and are now going to have an even harder time getting the number of free downloads necessary to get them noticed on Amazon's own rankings, which is what helps them get sales past the promo dates.