Powell's or Amazon
I recently decided to start writing mini-reviews or notices about the books I'm reading. It seemed logical to provide my readers with a link to more information about said book. And why not, just for fun, make that link one to a place that actually sells the book. I'm starting to get the hang of this affiliate marketing stuff.

Okay, my buddies over at Rain City Studios have a few links on The Standard, and I wanted something similar: an image of the book cover and a link to the page about that book at the bookstore. Seems simple enough. Off I went to Amazon.ca to sign up.

I was thwarted at the second screen about "payee information." I had filled in all of the required fields correctly, but each time I tried to advance to the next round of play, I was told firmly that I had missed the snap on the fields in red.

ALL of the fields were in red. Except for the ones for Address 2 and Address 3, which were blank (does anyone ever fill those out?).

After a fruitless 30 minutes trying to be one with Amazon's methods of input, I spent another 30 minutes exploring their byzantine "contact" information, going round and round til I finally found a generic form to fill out. (Fortunately, it let me post without waving red flags at me this time.)

Then I went promptly over to Powell's to sign up for their affiliate program.

I like Powell's Book Store a lot. They have a great selection and lots of choice of used/discount books. They were the first (that I know of) to offer free shipping on international orders. I was living in Japan when I first started ordering from them, and this was very important news to me. They also have an interesting newsletter.

What they don't have is the option for their affiliates to post one of those pretty book cover images with a link. I can get a text link with no problem and I can get a banner ad easily enough (see sidebar). To produce the lovely image in my recent Book Worm, I had to

• get the affiliate text link for the book
• grab the image from the book's page
• upload the image to my Flickr album
• direct Blogger to find the image
• change the linking from Flickr to Powell's so that my affiliate number will register

Flickr won't like this. I'll try to get around it for now by providing a separate link to Flickr whenever I blog about a book.

I'll let you know if I get any response from Powell's about the book image problem.

I did get a response from Amazon about that text field nonsense. For other Canadians who might want to try this dance, make sure that your postal code has a space between the two sets of three characters (mine did) and make sure that you type out your province name in full (but it's so l o n g!).

Wouldn't it have been simpler for Amazon to tell me that on the form itself? Drop-down menus have been used with some success by other companies.

Someone should buy Amazon this book.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 9:38 AM