Packing Heat 054: Lets Eat
| Download | Duration: 00:15:16
Let's Eat
Listen for an extended metaphor about where your money goes when you buy a book. These are loose, ballpark figures, but there is some truth in the proportions.
If you want to know more (and more accurate) proportions of royalties, I highly recommend Mike Stackpole's The Secrets podcast, particularly "Series 5" which is four episodes. I can't find them on his Stormwolf.com site, but here's a link.
http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Education-and-Professional/Writing/The-Secrets-Podcast/6777
There's also a lot of great info there about self-publishing and ebooks.
Your Assignment
Find an author or a blogger you wish to support, and find an Amazon affiliate link on their website. (Hint, the URL will have an affiliate ID tag in it.) Here is one of mine-
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934166561?ie=UTF8&tag=psycop-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1934166561
The affiliate ID buried in there is psycop-20.
Bookmark that link so that when you purchase things from Amazon — not just books, but anything at all — a kickback will go back to help support the author, reviewer or blogger whose content you enjoy!
The links I'm pooh-poohing are pages that simply aggregate a bunch of Amazon referral links without giving you any original content. Sometimes they disguise themselves as review sites, but when you look hard at them, you see they're actually lifting the reviews that reviewers have placed on Amazon itself. Phoey on them. They do not deserve to be making half as much as authors make just for posting a link. Don't click on those! Support your authors and reviewers and bloggers!
I can see you being ticked off at affiliates, but their life isn't that bed of roses.
Imagine a guy standing on the corner in a gorilla suit handing out fliers.
He's stands there everyday doing it, you think he must be making a lot and it's a good job.
Well if you were told that he only gets paid five dollars if someone takes his specific flier and hands it
in when they order.
He hands out hundreds of fliers a week and lets say only two people hand them in.
Is ten bucks fair pay for a week in a monkey suite?
BTW he's paying to rent said suit and to print up more fliers to hand out.
Also there are other guys doing the same thing up and down the block.
Does that sound like a good line a work to be in?
The rub with affiliation is that it's advertising that the company might not have to pay for.
A person can make hundreds of blogs with your ad on it and get nothing.
You still get those eyes on your ad, companies count on that.
The ones that do make a lot of money at it work just as hard as you.
Managing the websites and updating them, doing SEO getting that high Google rating.
Let's not forget paying for all that and they can still not make anything.
Arnold Schwarzenegger can get paid over a hundred million for a movie but Jackie Chan makes like
five. Jackie Chan is a real fighter and really risks his life on screen. That's unfair IMHO.
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I love the gorilla suit analogy! I think the gorilla suit is like added content -- an affiliate who posts a little article about the link, for instance, rather than just throwing a link out there without in any way adding value to it.
I think in your analogy the gorilla suit would have to be a hand-me-down and not rented, though. Because affiliates need to pay for their sites, but so do the authors (chefs), so it's an equal expense for both of them. Or maybe the chef is renting her uniform on top of only making 10 bucks a plate, if you want to look at it that way
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