Has Anyone Ever Done Kindle Affiliate Marketing? (22)
I noticed on MaxBounty a lot of the pay outs are around $1-2$, and
people are making several thousand dollars off some of these campaigns
every month.
Which is really fascinating to me as Ialways sold a little higher ticket
items ($40-500).
One of my big goals is to be a prolific fiction writer, I have a few short
stories and an ebook on the kindle that bring in some money every month.
And I am also fascinated with book marketing.
Most marketing is pretty miss when it comes to that stuff though.
But if you own a novel or nonfiction kindle book, you get 70% if it
is over $2.99. A lot of them are sold very well at $3.99.
Which means over a $2 pay out.
Has anyone ever tried this with building a landing page that then
leads to the amazon book offer?
I'd be interested if it converts at all, if you can optimize a campaign
like that to be profitable ROI on the front end, that'd be huge.
You could also use an amazon affiliate link as a tracking code.
And the 24-hour cookie would be a bonus if anyone else bought
anything else on Amazon while there.
Look forward to the pro thoughts 
I've tried the Kindle paid traffic approach and it's incredibly difficult to get anywhere close to profitability.
Even 70% commission priced at $3.99, that leaves you.. what, $3 spend to break even?
Now you've got to factor in the cost of reaching your target market, which is not going to be cheap.
Throw in the lack of a hard-sell when selling fiction (and most non-fiction), and you'd be a marketing legend to make money from this model.
The secret to success on the Kindle platform -- and I guess it's not really a secret -- is to leverage organic, free marketing.
If you have a series of fiction books, you give away the first one for free. 100s of users will download it, hopefully they'll like it and leave some positive reviews. If they really like it, they'll buy the other titles in the series. If you play it well, you can snowball in to success.
Much of this hinges on getting in to the Amazon bestseller charts and staying there.
Check out this post on Kindle I wrote last year: http://finchsells.com/2013/01/07/mak...0-in-5-months/
I personally know someone who has netted over US$2,000,000 on Kindle and other eBook platforms. What's more, the person did not even write the books himself.
The only real exportable lesson I can give you from his experience is ... if you can figure out a large and fast growing traffic source (whether it is Google, Facebook, Mobile or Kindle) much earlier than everyone else, you can generate some massive profits before these profits eventually get competed away.
Oddly enough, I'm working on a Kindle campaign right now. And I've run significant traffic to fiction projects in the past outside Amazon.
I'd agree with Finch - the killer issue, particularly in fiction, is the lack of a hard-sell. (The campaign I'm running just now is for a non-fiction book with a very strong marketing pitch). I'd be very interested to get into a longer discussion on the art of selling fiction, actually - most of our usual tactics don't apply there.
You can get around the fact you've got a softer sell if you can find very, very cheap clicks.
I've done well with Facebook in the past - if you're advertising to a demographic that doesn't usually attract big brand or affiliate spend, the click cost plummets.
However, if your primary demographic for your fiction crosses over with a major affiliate demo, you're going to get eaten alive. If you're planning to drive paid traffic to your fiction, it's worth considering that well in advance. I made the mistake of crossing over with affiliate demographics by accident on a fiction project, quite recently, and it was an expensive lesson to learn!
Even given cheap clicks, it's still not generally possible (in my experience, at least) to get to profitability on a single work of fiction, unless you're sitting on the next Fifty Shades.
I treat paid advertising on fiction as a list generation exercise - get 'em hooked for the first one, get them on a mailing list, and the LTV (Lifetime Value) of a conversion shoots up as they become repeat buyers and (with some clever marketing) evangelists for your brands.
Like on the App Store, the Kindle store is primarily a discovery based platform and not a search based platform. While people do search for books, the massive amounts of titles listed on the platform naturally pushes buyers to focus on the bestseller lists as a social proof based heuristic filtering mechanism.
This is why so many app developers pay affiliate marketers for burst campaigns. They do so not because the conversions they generate from these campaigns will be profitable, but rather because this will hopefully allow their apps to crack the top 10 or top 100 lists so that they can be discovered.
As a result, you can see why it is much more difficult to compete in this game now compared to 3-4 years ago. It is a lot easier to have a book in the top 10 of a certain category if there are only 10 ebooks currently available in that category, as opposed to thousands of books available in that category. And this is how it was 3-4 years ago.
That is an interesting idea, never heard of burst campaigns before but that makes a lot of sense why that would bbe pretty valuable.
I'm a pretty big fan of social lead freak, and my fiction is on the darker horror/literary fantasy side.
So my plan if I had the money to test it once I had a full blown novel out, would be to scrape
UIDs off facebook in groups/pages related to my genre (lovecraft, ligotti, indie authors,
broad pages related etc.)
And try it from there.
Being able to profit on the front end of that kind of funnel would be ridiculous awesome.
Even breaking even if it leads to email opt-ins for the next book launch.
By Amazon not converting because of no hard selling, do you mean the ad copy on the
amazon listing is too soft and not really doing much aggressive call to action stuff?
Wouldn't a presell page help with that issue?
@eidolon - I mean that the conventional tactics we use don't work as well for fiction.
It's very easy to define a pain point to use in your sales copy if you're writing a book on how to pick up girls.
It's much harder if you're writing a literary novel about the internal life of a displaced refugee attempting to forge a new life in a small town in Sweden. 
Some stuff - like social proof and, to a limited extent, scarcity - works OK, but a lot of the nuts and bolts of copywriting are a bit trickier to apply to fiction.
There must be some paid ad principles that can work, after all the fiction market is gigantic.
As a self publisher, this is a golden era of revolution even with the competition as it stands today, a fiction writer has an infinitely larger chance of making it than ever before.
It is harder to target pain points with fiction.
Perhaps pleasure points is the answer? Or part of it.
Originally Posted by eidolon
@cmdeal - There is one example of fiction advertising that works pretty reliably, on its own - feature film trailers.
Trailers are seriously, seriously hard to get right, though. I've been a filmmaker for nearly 20 years at this point, and I still can't reliably cut a really good selling trailer. It's an artform all of its own, and I believe (from last time I went around collecting quotes) one of the few editing jobs that still pays very well indeed.
And added to that, it's hard to find a more targeted audience than "people who just paid money for a very similar film". Trying to run a trailer on a more general web audience is significantly more difficult.
Originally Posted by cmdeal
I would say when borders was still around I walked into it once and saw a slogan saying "New books!" a cover caught my eye and the name (A Prince of Nothing) and I read the back of it, decided to give it a shot. Became one of my favorite series, have all 5 books out so far.
So that's an example of an ad working on a targeted audience that drove curiousity enough to try the free sample which led to buying.
Originally Posted by caurmen
In the same way, I'm going to guess if you targeted people who were fans of Michael Crichton (is he still around? I haven't read fiction in years) on Facebook with an inquisitive ad like "Better Than Michael Crichton?" strumming on the curiosity angle with a similar product for a similar audience, you would get a decent amount of traction. Use the principles of endorsement without explicitly having someone endorsing you.
@timtetra - Definitely. Social proof is huge, fairly easy to do in a trailer (see also the big pile of "won awards at BLAH festival" slides for indie films), and definitely very important.
It won't sell a film on its own, though - and knowing which names will attract which audiences in connection with which other names/themes/plots is an art in itself. SOME names will sell almost anything, but then you've got the problem of persuading that name to star in your film...
I've tried the "better than Michael Crichton?" approach, with mixed results. One of the problems with the approach is that for hardcore fans, the answer is almost always "NO!".
"Like BLAH author BUT ... with dinosaurs / in space / etc" has worked better, but still doesn't exactly blow the doors off, at least when I've tested it. It has worked better for non-fiction entertainment than fiction in my experience.
Originally Posted by eidolon
But then you have to consider:
1) What about the thousands of books you walked straight past?
2) How do you find the online equivalent of a guy walking in to Waterstones? (This act alone suggests you were primed to purchase a book -- in a way that somebody browsing around the web probably isn't.)
The closest thing to a browser looking on the web as if he was in a bookstore would be either the actual kindle website, or sites like goodreads I would imagine.
Perhaps the real solution is rather than selling a book title, sell on the author's personality brand. Build in the opt-in list by giving the reader the benefit of getting the coolest new stories in the genre they want to read (whatever the author reads and likes he shares, as well as his own books).
I'm not sure how one would track the success of it though, as I'm pretty new to tracking and don't know if there is a way to track what traffic source the customer originally came from if they buy based off your email list.
Suppose the info might be there in the aweber if you go through each customer who bought specifically.
There must be an online equivalent somewhere I imagine.
If there's not, it is still pretty fun to imagine that there is...
Oh and on the prince of nothing scenario, I didn't walk past hardly any books, it was right in the front of the store.
I read mainly fantasy, least back then, and the big NEW BOOKS sign drew me in and then a fantasy title right there after I came to the store with the intention of buying books. It was a "solo ad" style you could almost say, because it caught my attention before anything else could possibly catch my eye since it was right there in the front.
Interesting, I remember reading a case study awhile back of a woman who dabbled in AM who used that angle on some similar authors in the same niche she was in and skyrocketed to #1. I've never done it as I don't write books, but that is just what I heard.
Perhaps it works better for people with much more niche followings? Michael Crichton's stuff in his heyday was read by basically anyone who read fiction. Whereas if you have some mini celebrity in the gardening fiction genre, you might be able to appeal much more.
i.e.
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Originally Posted by timtetra
You guys crack me up with those examples haha.
Lot of good tips in this thread!.
@eidolon - the "author's personality brand" approach definitely works. Fairly big names - John Scalzi, Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow or even Neil Gaiman - owe a considerable chunk of their success to their very well-read blogs.
@timtetra - Interesting! It's possible my tests on this weren't positioned correctly - I may well do some more testing on a similar line, and shall report back if so...
Originally Posted by caurmen
Bit late here but here is what currently works with Kindle.
1. Create a series of books and build a list. this is extremely valuable. You build a 10,000 member list via the permafree and then hope that 100-1000 of them buy your book...which rockets it up the charts and Amazon sell it for you...supposedly. I have always found people who sign up for free books unsubscribe when you try and sell something to them. A prime example was halloween - I have a series of 5 books, one is permafree and I get around 25 sign ups per day using manual FB ads on groups cleverly done and FB Lead Generation ($5 per day total spend!). I started THIS list just a week ago, already have over 80 subs. Anyway I sent an email on Saturday, wishing them all halloween etc, and reminding them that book #2 (which was for sale for just $0.99) had a halloween theme. The result - 6 unsubscribed, 2 emailed me directly telling me they wanted that for free also, along with the rest of the series, because they left me a 3 star review for book one (am I supposed to be greatful for this?), and I got another 2 sales of it, which made me $0.66.
So at the moment I am throwing away $5 a day on FB ads, but I don't consider this a waste because a list is a good thing. When you get to a few thousand members you can add psychological emails like giving them a free book and asking them for a review on another one etc, apparently.
2. You create a series of books, set #1 as permafree and then you bundle it with 5-10 other books in the same genre with other authors. You put the most successfull/well known Author as #1 in the series and "sell" them off the back of her success and hope people join your list/buy your other books.
The excellent thing about kindle for NON Fiction is that if you play it right you get 100% free traffic. I will make a thread on this...
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