Amazon Changes To Free Kindle Book Promotion

English: Amazon Kindle wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It appears that Amazon is concerned that free Kindle book promotion blogs are becoming too successful. A few days ago Amazon made a change to their affiliate program that is going to shut down several of the larger free Kindle book blogs (or at least radically change them).

The rule change now will make it so that any blog that has more than 20,000 free kindle books a month and less than 5% of books sold are paid books will no longer receive any Amazon Affiliate income for the month.

I do not believe that will affect Bookwi.se because I am not that big. But I am not sure because Amazon does not currently share how many free books are purchased through my Affiliate links. I assume that Amazon will have to start publicly showing this information so that we can know what is going on. 20,000 books seems like a lot, but it is only an average of 667 free books purchased a day. If every visitor or RSS or email subscribers gets one free book a day I could be very close to the threshold.

Right now Amazon is my only reliable source of income. On average I make about $0.65 per post. So I am not getting rich by any means. But it does provide some income to buy more books and cover my blog’s hosting costs.

If I grow much larger (and I don’t think I have to grow much more for this to affect me) I might have to make some changes. But one way to keep the problem at bay for Bookwi.se is for you to buy more paid books through the Bookwi.se links as well as free books.

Any time you purchase a book (or anything else on Amazon), if you first click through one of the Bookwi.se links (or use the Amazon search box on the top right of the blog) then Bookwi.se get 4 to 6% of the purchase price (depending on how many purchases have been made that month and what type of item you are purchasing.)

In other advertising news, it is likely in the next two or three months I will end Google ads on Bookwi.se as well. Google only pays in $100 increments and it has been nearly 2 years to get my first $100. So once I hit that point I will stop using Google ads. I may stop ads completely because earlier this month I stopped using Conjunction Junction’s ad program because of lack of sales. However, the problem with stopping other ads is that Amazon will become my only source of income and I will need to make sure I do not cross the threshold where Amazon stops paying Affiliate income because of free books.

My guess is that most free book sites will have to change to a new model (subscription programs for free books?). Books On The Knob announced this morning she is splitting her site in two (free books and everything else) to try and keep her affiliate income. Life always changes.