Sell your books on Amazon, but don’t lock yourself into an exclusive deal. Here are 18 compelling reasons to also list your eBooks and audiobooks on BooksOnline.Club:
Benefit #1
BooksOnline pays 60% (base royalty of 30% + 30% affiliate fee) on all your eBooks no matter the price. Amazon pays a royalty of only 35% on your eBooks priced outside the price range of $2.99 to $9.99, and 70% for eBooks within that price range. BooksOnline does not penalize you for pricing your books outside that range. You get 60% (30% base royalty + 30% affiliate fee) of the sales price, whatever it is.
Explanation: As the author, you get paid in three ways at BooksOnline.Club:
1. 30% for every sale of your eBook/audiobook and we call that the “base royalty” plus
2. 30% for every sale of your eBook/audiobook through your own registered affiliate link (this is a link to your book you can include on your YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs, or social media) plus
3. 30% affiliate fee for sales of any other eBook or audiobook that is part of our affiliate program and hosted on BooksOnline.Club through your own registered affiliate link. In other words, your affiliate link is good not only for sales of your own eBook/audiobook but for all our eBooks/audiobooks included in our affiliate program.
There’s a not-so-obvious benefit that can generate more sales and income for authors. Registered Affiliates of BooksOnline.Club are motivated to use their affiliate link to sell your book all over the Internet. That can generate many more sales, which means 30% (included in your base royalty) to you for every one of those sales. BooksOnline.Club will be marketing this affiliate system to major players, all of which will redound to your benefit over the long run.
Example: If your eBook is listed at $24.99, Amazon only pays you 35% or $8.74. BooksOnline pays you 30% royalty as the author plus 30% of sales through your affiliate link, or 60%, which is $14.99.
Example: If you had 1,000 sales of this same eBook, your total royalties from Amazon would be $8,740 vs. BooksOnline where your total royalties would be $14,990, not counting income from additional affiliate sales.
Example: If you sell an eBook on Amazon priced at $9.99 you earn 70% or $6.99. If you price that same eBook at $19.99 on Amazon, you earn 35% or $6.99. This is how ridiculous it can get at Amazon. BooksOnline pays from the same royalty schedule no matter how you price your eBook. Price it higher, if the market will bear it, and you earn more, but not necessarily at Amazon.
Benefit #2
BooksOnline pays you 60% (base royalty of 30% + 30% affiliate fee) on all your audiobooks no matter the price. Amazon through ACX only pays you 25% if you don’t give them the exclusive license to distribute your audiobook (40% if you give them an exclusive). As a part of their base royalty, authors at BooksOnline receive 30% for audiobooks sold through Affiliates. These are sales generated by Affiliates, not authors, so these are additional sales and additional income.
Example: If your audiobook sells for $14.99 Amazon only pays you $3.75 for a nonexclusive. BooksOnline pays you 30% royalty as the author plus 30% of sales through your affiliate link, or 60%, which is $8.99, not counting income from additional affiliate sales.
Example: If you had 1,000 sales of this same audiobook, your total royalties from Amazon would be $3,750 vs. BooksOnline where your total royalties would be $8,990.
Benefit #3
BooksOnline pays you a 30% affiliate fee for every book in our inventory (eBooks and audiobooks) that are purchased through your affiliate link. Amazon has an affiliate program they call their Associates program, but you have to get approved by establishing you have a large lead generation system already built on the Internet, and even then Amazon only pays about 5% as a fee.
Example: If someone clicks on your affiliate link on your YouTube channel, your podcast, your blog, or your social media post, you earn 60% if they buy your eBook, but you also earn 30% if they don’t buy your eBook and they purchase any other eBook or audiobook on BooksOnline through that same affiliate link. When was the last time Amazon did that?
Benefit #4
BooksOnline pays you from the same royalty schedule for public domain books (30% base plus 30% affiliate fee = 60%), but Amazon only pays you 35% for public domain eBooks.
Benefit #5
Authors at BooksOnline also earn additional income through affiliate sales. BooksOnline’s built-in marketing system helps authors increase sales via affiliates who independently promote an author’s eBook or audiobook because they receive a 30% affiliate fee. This means another stream of revenue for authors because they get a base royalty of 30% for all of these additional sales through other Affiliates.
Example: Let’s re-examine one of the earlier examples with your eBook priced at $24.99. If you had a sales volume of 1,000, your total royalties from Amazon would be $8,740 vs. BooksOnline, where your total income would be $14,990. In that prior example, we did not include income from additional affiliate sales. If registered Affiliates sell 500 additional copies of your eBook, you earn an additional $3,748 (30% of the retail price). So your total income in this hypothetical is $14,990 + $3,748 = $18,738. With or without the affiliates making sales, you’re earning substantially more than you would at Amazon or any of the other online bookstores.
Benefit #6
BooksOnline makes buying eBooks and audiobooks much more attractive to your readers by giving them ownership of their eBooks and audiobooks, not just the license to access them from servers like Amazon.
Benefit #7
BooksOnline gives your readers DRM-free eBooks. DRM stands for digital rights management, and Amazon uses a proprietary DRM that restricts the devices that your readers can use to read your eBooks. BooksOnline uses DRM free ePubs, which gives your readers the greatest freedom in reading your eBooks on the most dedicated eReaders and the most reading apps on all operating systems. This means happy customers and may translate into more sales.
Benefit #8
While you could opt out of Amazon’s DRM when you upload your eBook in KDP, you are still locked within Amazon’s tight ecosystem, and many authors are trying to get away from how Amazon dictates pricing, royalties, and how it uses various programs to control what you can and cannot do with your books. BooksOnline offers a dedicated distribution model that is optimized in every way for you as an author and your readers.
Benefit #9
BooksOnline has the highest paying 30% affiliate payout of any online eBook and audiobook distributor. This creates the motivation for dozens (or hundreds) of people to sign up for their free affiliate link so they can earn 30% promoting your books. We have free courses with articles and videos training for affiliates that shows them how to promote your book in less than 60 seconds on their YouTube channel or social media with our AMP (Affiliate Marketing Program). Amazon cannot compete with this. In fact, no online book distributor offers authors like you this kind of marketing system at no cost to you.
Benefit #10
Affiliates can log into their affiliate account any time to view their affiliate sales, their passive income, and see the books sold as well as monitor the automatic deposits into their bank account. The system is transparent and accountable.
Benefit #11
BooksOnline offers authors an entire book review section where readers can post their reviews, or you can copy and paste reviews from Amazon as long as Amazon is given credit. Unlike Amazon, which does not allow you to rebut or answer a review, at BooksOnline you certainly can comment on a book review and rebut or clarify or answer a question. Amazon does not allow you to rebut a review, nor will they take down a fake one. They claim you can contest a review, but good luck with that.
Benefit #12
BooksOnline offers authors another huge benefit with video reviews that can be submitted by readers, and not the short clutsy videos often seen on Amazon. A reader can submit a beautiful video review and they’re not limited to 30 seconds or a minute. Unlike Amazon, reviews by family members or friends are allowed as long as they are reviews by registered members of BooksOnline.Club.
Benefit #13
BooksOnline gives authors a Book Detail Page that blows Amazon’s Book Detail Page out of the water. You can create a gorgeous page for your book listing, and you can include a preview, photos, and you can embed your own promotional video. There’s a tab for reviews, including video reviews, and there are no limits on the number of words. You could create what professional salespeople call a Landing Page.
Additionally, you can include what Amazon calls an “A+” section on your Book Detail Page without the trademark requirement that Amazon enforces. Amazon’s Book Detail Page is full of details, but it is stale and way too busy with links to many other books and thousands of other products, as well as suggested products and sponsored products.
Benefit #14
BooksOnline helps you optimize your Book Detail Page for the search engines, including the AI databases. Amazon does none of this.
Benefit #15
BooksOnline offers authors a private forum where they can ask questions, share tips, and hear success stories from other authors.
Benefit #16
BooksOnline only sells eBooks and audiobooks. This is our sole business. Amazon sells between 350 million and 600 million products, including about 30 million books. Our mission is far more aligned with your calling as an author than Amazon’s mission.
Benefit #17
BooksOnline allows you, as an author, to offer discounts on your book in any amount and for any time period without restriction. You can offer a discount as a promotion. You can even give your eBook/audiobook away free as a promotion. Amazon does not allow you to do this. They have something called KDP Select, which allows you to offer a free book as a promotion for a maximum of 5 days in any 90-day period, but to be part of that program, you have to give Amazon an exclusive license to distribute your book. BooksOnline never requires exclusivity, and we don’t make up complicated little rules with all kinds of traps for the unwary author.
Benefit #18
BooksOnline also has Gift Cards, which can be purchased in any amount and given as a gift via email to someone. Gift card accounts show the card balance.
What say you now?
You’ve gotten a glimpse of what BooksOnline offers authors like you. Is this tempting? We would love to see you at BooksOnline. Come and join us!
