Recently, Amazon ripped me off yet also didn’t. I have for many years had an Amazon Associates account, which is a method of getting a small amount of money from links and advertisements. Since I’ve run irregular review blogs for decades now, I’ve long had such an account. I haven’t made a profit from it—you need a crazy amount of traffic and click-throughs to make a profit—but it defrays the cost of my hobby a bit.
I had all but forgotten about my account, though I still habitually made links through it, simply because, until recently, I stopped getting any significant click-throughs after I switched from my old blog to this one. Just recently, after publishing my books, my click-throughs have begun generating what I consider a significant amount of money.
A few weeks ago, I got a notice from Amazon that, with no possibility of appeal, they were closing my account and handing my earnings over to the government. The notice seemed so unlikely that I contacted a representative to be sure I wasn’t getting hoaxed. It turns out it was genuine and also my own damn fault: I had neglected to update my contact and tax information for long enough that I was considered out of contact, and my earnings were therefore forfeit.
And that’s why you should keep track of that stuff.
I’m writing this in part because I opened a new associates account; as an indie author, it would be dumb not to have one as it means, at least occasionally, I can eke out slightly more royalties. Also, I need a few clicks to validate the new account, so in this post I am strongly encouraging you to buy Jake and the Dynamo. You’ll like it. It’s funny. That was an affiliate link, by the way.
I also, in the midst of this, accidentally discovered a feature I didn’t know existed. It appears that if I drop an affiliate link into the HTML editor with no markup around it, WordPress will automatically create that interactive box you see at the top of the post. That’s pretty neat, so I’m going to use that from now on.