Becoming a Smashwords Affiliate
If you encourage others to get e-books from Smashwords you can get paid by them.
- It's easy to set up
- It's easy to make the links needed
- You can earn between 11% and 70% of the book price. The actual amount you get is set by the author, not Smashwords
- Smashwords say they credit your account within 48 hours and will pay you each quarter (provided you've earned $25 at least).
You will need a Smashwords account. Go here to get one and click the 'Learn what we have to offer readers and authors' button in the 'Welcome Guest' section. It's free to set up.
Once you've got a Smashwords account learn about their affiliates at this plain English page - https://www.smashwords.com/about/smashwords_affiliate_documentation . Follow their instructions to set up as an affiliate.
Smashwords affiliate fees
Smashwords offers affiliate payments of 11% to 70.5% of the retail price of e-books. The actual percentage offered is determined by the author. I, for example, offer a 35% affiliate rate. The default is 11%. Anyone age 18+ with a Smashwords account is eligible to enrol.
Smashwords encourages the use of affiliate tags on free e-books and the author's own e-book links. You won't earn anything on those e-books but if a customer goes on to view and purchase other items at Smashwords, you'll get affiliate payments for those.
Affiliate fees come from the author's royalties. The author can choose not to offer affiliate payments. If an author elects to not offer an affiliate program for a book then the author's royalty is 85%.
Affiliate links are easy to create. My preferred method is to append the ?ref=[yourScreenName] code to links where [yourScreenName] is the bit after https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ on your 'My Smashwords page' at https://www.smashwords.com/profile Use the links, for example in Twitter, Facebook or other social media.
There are other affiliate schemes for books
Amazon offers one. Amazon offers 4% to 8.5% though. Far less than Smashwords. Their scheme isn't as simple. To earn 8.5% you would have to sell 3,131 books in a month. Some may do that but most won't.
If you managed to sell Amazon's 3,131 books at Smashwords and they were ours, we would both earn an extra $3,298.51 because we offer a 35% affiliate payment.
Give it a go - you can't lose anything. To get you started here's a Twitter and Facebook post you could make. Replace the 'JChapman' in them with your own Smashwords affiliate tag.
Twitter post examples
Here are the texts of some tweets:
If you like a L…O…N…G read, check out https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/722854?ref=jchapman - #romantic technothriller A Vested Interest omnibus edition (bks 1 & 2) $2.50 pic.twitter.com/foaNwEK4DJ
It will look something like this:
(You can get the image by right clicking this link and choosing 'Save link as')
Here's a second and third post for the same books seperately:
Get a FREE #technothriller at #Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/180258?ref=JChapman pic.twitter.com/lcyOHHO9Hr
It will look something like:
(If you don't have the Web of Trust browser plugin, your's may not display the two green circles indicating trustworthy links)
…and the second book tweet would be:
Get the mind-blowing sequel to FREE Immortality Gene at Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/180424?ref=JChapman … pic.twitter.com/n9ebOl13iv
It will look something like:
(Again you can get the promotion image by right clicking and downloading this link)
Facebook posts
Amazon isn't the only place to get e-books. Smashwords has them available in all formats. This one is #FREE https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/180258?ref=JChapman
For this one you'll need to click the camera icon and add this image (right click it to download it to your computer then upload it to Facebook using the camera icon):
On Facebook, it will look something like:
Finally - here are more of our books at Smashwords you can link to
