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Social Media: Amazon Affiliate Program Changes and A Fresh Crop of Social Media Links

Picture of a tortoiseshell cat.
The Amazon Affiliate Program: What’s Changed Recently

You may have heard that Amazon has changed its terms for its affiliate program. Here is the change.

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

This affects people who rely on posting free books as part of their business model. The reason you’d drive traffic to free books is because Amazon’s rates change depending on the total number of books sold.

For example, let’s say I sell some books for Amazon by blogging about a book and pointing to Amazon with an affiliate link, a specially constructed URL that points to the book on Amazon. I get a very small percentage of each sale. That percentage can differ according to what merchandise it is, but it also differs according to how many items I’ve sold that month if it falls in the “General Product” category.

So let’s say I do that. Perhaps I mention that I often use Samuel R. Delany’s wonderful About Writing in teaching. Over the course of a month, three people buy the book (in my experience this is an optimistic estimate. Let’s say that’s all the traffic I drive this month. Because I’ve only sold 3, my percentage is 4%.

But let’s say I also blogged about a bunch of free stuff and people bought books through the same sort of affiliate link. Let’s say I am incredibly diligent about this and sell 628 free books. That 628+3 moves me into the 8% tier – double that original 4%.

Which can start to add up if you’re making some secondary sales, where folks are ordering not the book you linked to, but still poking around on Amazon and buying other things.

So that, in a nutshell, is the Amazon change. If it’s all goobledygook to you, you probably are not one of the people that need to worry about it. And what does that have to do with social media? The answer is that social media shares are how some affiliates drive traffic.

The best of links recently saved to use in my Building an Online Presence for Writers and Blogging and Social Networking 101 classes:
You can follow all my social media links on Delicious.

Pinterest is a social network I’m still find a lot of reasons to like. I use it to provide a regularly changing source of visual interest for this blog as well as to organize some of my blog posts like posts on writing or posts on social networking.

A study on what increases Twitter followers. No surprise here: positivity and informational content.

How to use a press release to increase your online visibility.

Online book discovery is something market-minded writers need to pay attention to. Here’s why it’s currently not working well.

Obscurity: A Better Way to Think About Your Data than “Privacy.” An interesting piece by Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger about online life and privacy concerns.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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How to Critique: Best Practices for Workshopping

Abstract image to accompany blog post about critiquing stories by speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo.
If you're interested in getting your stories workshopped, click on this picture in order to find out more about My Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction Stories online class. There's also an Advanced Workshop, as well as classes focusing on individual aspects of writing, like description, characters, and fleshing out stories.
Both my Writing F&SF Stories and Advanced workshops offer students a chance to critique and be critiqued. To my mind, the latter is actually more useful, because being forced to articulate one’s position on an aspect of writing can be enlightening and instructive. With that in mind, here’s some best practices for such workshops.

Overall:

  1. Start with what works. Let the writer know what you see as the story’s strengths and how they might capitalize on them.
  2. What keeps you from connecting with the story? What don’t you understand? Sometimes the most useful thing you can give someone is a brief synopsis of what you think is going on in the story, because it may not match their intent.
  3. Critique big ticket items, not little nitpicks.
  4. It’s more important to point out what’s broken than to make suggestions how to fix it, because that fix will differ radically from writer to writer.
  5. How do the beginning and ending work together to create a satisfying story? Is the story that’s provided the one the one promised in the beginning? Is the ending set up in a satisfying way? Is it the result of character actions?
  6. What’s missing? What don’t you understand?
  7. What seems extraneous, unneeded or distracting?
  8. What’s the pacing like? Where does the story drag and where does it skip too quickly through details?
  9. Where are the info-dumps and how can that information be spread out?
  10. How well does the title work? If not well, what possible better titles can be drawn from the story?

Characters:

  1. Are the characters likeable?
  2. Are the characters acting or reacting?
  3. Does the character have a point of identification with the reader, such as a problem, situation or want that both of them hold?
  4. Where can we go deeper into the character’s head? Does the reader know what the character wants? Where don’t we understand what the character is doing?
  5. Are there too many characters? Can any be combined?
  6. Is the dialogue interesting and informative of character?
  7. Is the point of view consistent?

World:

  1. Is the world clear? Does the reader know where they are?
  2. Does it feel generic? (Is it?) How can it be made more specific and evocative?
  3. Does it make sense?
  4. How important is the science of it? Are the facts right?
  5. Where should we know more?
  6. Where can the world come forward more?
  7. Where can more sensory detail be worked in?
  8. Is the culture interesting and also make sense?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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Teaser: Another Excerpt from A New Board is Elected at Villa Encantada

Picture of a stone lantern.Here’s another chunk from “A New Board is Elected at Villa Encantada,” (working title) a darkly humorous story about a very odd condo complex that I’ve written several stories about already. It’s been fun filling out the complex’s roster a little in this story, and I’m going back to revise one of the unpublished ones with some of these details. Like the talking cacti.

Even the cacti garden was talking about the assessment. I usually don’t visit down there, in the little rock garden near the lake. For one thing all of the cacti like to talk at once. They ramble and they repeat and they are altogether too fond of puns. Not for the first time, I wondered what exactly the magician who had created them had had in mind. Had it really been a dozen cranky plants, whose extreme longevity led them to be highly opinionated about everything?

There are twelve cacti altogether, eleven in pots and one who has chosen to plant itself and grow. The eleven in pots have opted for mobility over size. They were fond of making Rumpelstiltskin wheel them about the complex in order to enjoy the sun and fresh air.

Each was distinctive, both in personality and appearance. They had names, which usually mattered only to each other. I had mentally bestowed nicknames on them: Bombast, Furor, Humblepie, Obscuro, Smarmy, Weasel, Johnny Nonsense, Earnest, Hairyfoot, Splainer, and the unpotted Old Dignity, a massive saguaro towering a good fifteen feet over its much shorter, hideously root bound, compatriots.

Bombast said, “It’s a cabal! They’ve been waiting to seize power for years now, and rob our reserves, turn us over to some real estate agent so the complex can be demolished for a high rise.”

Furor said, “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not organized enough to be a cabal. And this place isn’t zoned for high-rises.” It added, its tone dark, “No, what they have in store for us is much, much worse.”

“How can they hope to understand the history of the complex?” demanded Hairyfoot. “Most of them haven’t even been here a decade.”

I considered them. The complex was odd at the best of times. It was a refuge, a complex that didn’t mind people who were outside the ordinary. That led to a population that was more mixed than most, including the denizens of this garden.

Earnest said to me, “Did you give your proxy to someone to vote?”

I shook my head and fled.

Rumpelstiltskin was by the dumpster, sorting out recyclables. He looked wretched and smudgy as an old sheet of newsprint. As I passed, he looked up, and said, hopefully, “What’s my name?”

“Not today,” I said. “You won’t escape today.”

I felt guilty at the look on his face, and the situation made me itch, but it’s been so hard to find a maintenance man here that I could understand why they had done it. Sometimes when you find good help, you have to rely on the laws of magic to keep them from leaving. Unscrupulous? Yes, undoubtedly. But the needs of the many outweigh those of the few. Or the one, in his case.

If you want to read the rest of the story, you can get it, along with at least six other stories, at the end of July by signing up to sponsor me in the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Even a small donation entitles you to the stories, so please do sign up!

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