The checks are in the mail!

Wednesday, Oct 7

Yippee. I always feel better when the payroll is done. I love to pay authors, because when you make money, we make money.

A question came up earlier this week about how to tell which sites are "legitimate" places where we make your books available and how the distributor site system works. Thanks to Elena Bowman for the question. While I sent her an answer, I wanted to put that information here, where everyone can read it.

For sales through distributors, I concentrate on getting our books on sites that have affiliates. That means they sell the books not just from their own site, but from sites that link to them as affiliates. It's called networking sites and the computers all talk to one another.

Here's how it works. I list your book with Mobipocket. Mobi lists it with amazon for Kindle. Both Mobi and amazon have affiliate sites, so you may find your book on amazon, on some English language site in Germany, via Mobipocket, and on www.target.com, because Target is an affiliate of amazon. If someone buys your book from Target.com, the money gets collected by amazon's computer and they pay us for a "kindle" sale. I list your book on Fictionwise. Barnes & Noble is an affiliate of Fictionwise, so they pick up the book from FW and also list it with their affiliates as well and if someone buys from an affiliate the money goes back to B&N or FW and they pay US.

I list your book at allromanceebooks.com and Omnilit.com is an affiliate of allromanceebooks and we get paid whichever site the customer buys from. This is why lots of new sites pop up when you Google your name. It's easy to tell the ligitimate ones as they will have the logo of the sponsor distribution site, FW, Amazon, Mobi, Barnes & Noble, Coffeetime, or ARE. That's why the venue column is important on the sales reports--it lets you know where the book sold from.

arline