Vamplit Publishing Novels For Affiliate Marketers

Basic program overview:

• Earn generous commissions of 40% of the net sales price on Vamplit Publishing Novels
• Easy to participate through Smashwords our distribution provider
• You receive commissions on all purchases within a 48 hour period
• Your customers have Vamplit Publishing novels and over 14,000 other ebooks to choose from

Who’s Eligible to Enroll?
Anyone over age 18 is eligible. The program is ideal for:

• bloggers
• authors
• publishers
• website operators
• online communities
• book enthusiasts
• online specialty bookstores
• professional affiliate marketers

How to Enroll

To enroll as a Smashwords Affiliate, go to your Account page and click the “Affiliate System Management” link where you will need to review and agree with the Smashwords Affiliate Marketing Program Terms of Service.

How to Create Affiliate Links

There are three ways to create affiliate links.

Option 1: Browse the book selector to view participating books and access cut-and-pasteable affiliate links for your blog or website.

Option 2: As an affiliate, you simply append the text, “?ref=yourScreenName” at the end of any web address (web addresses are also called URLs). To locate your screen name, click to your My Smashwords page, and look in the web browser address bar. You’ll see an address where the last charactes after “…view/” are your user name. “https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/yourScreenName”

Once you locate your screenname, you can append it to links to the Smashwords home page, any author or publisher page, any book page, and any category or sub-category of books. You can even link to free books (while there’s obviously no commission on a free book, by offering links to free books you’ll drive traffic to Smashwords, and if the visitors purchase books while browsing Smashwords, you earn the commission).

To find the initial hyperlink, just go to the Smashwords home page, navigate to the link you want to promote, append your ?ref=yourScreenName code, and then that’s the link you’ll use.:

Example 1. Link to the Smashwords home page

http://www.smashwords.com/?ref=yourScreenName

Example 2. Link to Publisher page for Smashwords publisher, Excessica:

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/excessica?ref=yourScreenName

Example 3. Link to Book page for the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide (even though this is a free book, it’s one of our most popular books and if some clicks to this book, then purchases another book, the affiliate gets credit)

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/305?ref=yourScreenName

Example 4. Link to Literary best-sellers under 25,000 words

http://www.smashwords.com/books/category/881/popular/0/any/short?ref=yourScreenName

Example 5. Link to Fiction books
http://www.smashwords.com/books/category/3?ref=yourScreenName

Option 3: When you visit the Smashwords website while logged into your affiliate account, you’ll see links at the bottom of such pages, which you may copy and paste onto your own website, blog, etc.

The Cookie Clock

When anyone clicks on that URL, which you’ll add to your blog, website and other online promotional locations, Smashwords instantly recognizes that that customer came from you. Smashwords deposits what’s called a “Cookie” into the user’s browser, which helps the site give you credit for their purchases. The cookie expires after 48 hours. The cookie’s clock resets if the user clicks on your link again, or disappears if the user clicks on another affiliate’s link before the 48 hour period is completed.

How Earnings are Calculated

As an affiliate, you receive a minimum of 11% of the net proceeds from the sale of participating books. “Net proceeds” = (the book’s selling price minus the PayPal processing fee)*.11.

Juicing

Authors and publishers can choose to “juice,” or increase, the commission rate for affiliates by sharing a portion of their royalties with affiliates. Authors and publishers do this to encourage affiliates to aggressively promote and link to their books. If author decide to hand over their entire royalty to affiliates, then the affiliate can earn up to 70.5%. Some authors and publishers will do this to increase their readership. Smashwords is creating tools to help affiliates identify books that offer the best affiliate bonuses.

Conversely, Smashwords authors and publishers may opt-out of the affiliate program on a book-by-book basis.

The Monthy Committment

At Smashwords, we appreciate the time and investment affiliates make to promote our books. Therefore, we’ve built protections into the affiliate system so that affiliates aren’t vulnerable to accidental or deliberate “bait and switches.” For example, when an author or publisher publishes a book for the first time at Smashwords, they’re automatically enrolled in the affiliate program. They are given a 30 day grace period in which they can opt-out at any time. After the grace period expires, they are only allowed to opt out effective the first day of every new month. Therefore, as an affiliate, you should monitor the titles you’re promoting, and you should visit the Affiliate Management page on the first of each month to identify the month’s participating titles as well as special “juicing” offers. Once an author/publisher juices their title, they are not allowed to reduce the rate until the first of the next month. This allows the affiliates to have some measure of certaintly about the affiliate rates for the month.

However, it’s still possible for a promoted title to disappear out of the system. For example, an author could decide to unpublish their books from Smashwords. This is rare, but it does happen. It’s smart to check your links periodically.

Tracking Affiliate Click Throughs and Earnings

Affiliate earnings are listed in your Sales & Payment history, available via the link on your Dashboard. (The bonuses will be listed as “Referral bonus for Book Title by Author”.)

Affiliates are paid on the same quarterly schedule as we pay authors and publishers. To qualify for payment, your accrued balance must equal USD $25.00 or more.

You may also see how well your affiliate links Smashwords are working by clicking the “View Affiliate Hit Report” on your Account page.

What Books Are Eligible?

All books that are not opted out of the affiliate system are eliligle for promotion. In most instances, it still makes sense to link to opted-out books because once readers land at Smashwords, they’re likely to browse other books that can still earn you an affiliate bonus.

To sign up as an affiliate marketer, first read the Smashwords Affiliate Marketing Program Terms of Service. Next, visit the Affiliate Marketing Program Signup Page.

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