They initially denied it but after appeal, they have finally approved!
Also, upon further exploration, it seems that I will not be needing affiliate approval to open new languages. As the amazon api is quite limited, i’ve had to figure out a different way to get at amazon book information in order to get the amazon auto-upload feature working, which I’ve successfully done!
This means I probably will be able to open up more languages quicker, but we still will focus on German & Spanish first and then perhaps French… before we go too crazy.
All that being said, getting these approvals is still very nice as then I can immediately start to monetize these things… so it’s still very appreciated! Only a little less critical.
Things are usually(?) substantially cheaper up-front on Amazon JP though (ironically sometimes even the ones with the Bookwalker imprint). Any idea at what point does Bookwalker works out to being cheaper?
I’ve been starting to shift to Bookwalker anyway b/c their book sorting is much better, and Amazon has been a pain about region-locked stuff lately (to the point where I bought a NordVPN subscription)
anytime you can get something with a coupon or increased coin-back. (They currently have 3x 500 yen coupons, for example… but there is literally something on sale all the time)
Their yearly 50% coin back event should start in a few days and then it’s basically buy 2 get 1 for free.
Regular price might be cheaper on amazon… but I have yet to pay regular price on a single ebook I own.
Quick question, I have a Kindle linked to my US account, if I sign up for a Amazon JP account can I still download Kindle books to transfer via USB? When I do it on my US account it usually requires me to pick a device before I can download, and idk if a Kindle can be linked on two accounts at once.
However (maybe because my kindle is older? It’s from 2017), when I have books downloaded from one account and switch to another one, the downloaded books remain and I can still read them. It’s not very helpful if you buy new books, of course, but it’s nice if I want to read something in English even though I’ve switched to my Japanese account, for example.
I just got an email from honto saying that they’re going to stop selling physical books from the end of March next year and will be exclusively e-books. Apparently for physical books they’ll point you at 「e-hon」, who they didn’t give a URL for but who I assume are https://www.e-hon.ne.jp/ . Anybody got experience of them? I had a quick poke around the site and it looks like they don’t do international delivery. They seem to be some sort of front end for physical bookstores where you select your “home” store on sign-up and then that store makes the sale even if you get the book delivered rather than picking it up from there.
We now need three sales through either of those amazons to become an approved affiliate. FYI, the new upload process does require Natively to be an approved affiliate so that I can use their API.
I was able to figure out how to get approval on amazon.es & amazon.de (thanks @Megumin and @Biblio !). All I needed to do was figure out their appeal procss and I’ve been having success now. There’s nothing incorrect on my approach, just the frontline workers seem to get confused by all the links.
We also are still waiting on amazon.co.uk, but that one isn’t critical as no language depends on it
I’ll leave it as is for now? Not sure if there was an action item here.
PS:
Procedure for helping out:
go to ハピネス 1 | L17 and click the amazon.it & amazon.fr link there (this tags your session)
now purchase whatever you want to purchase
If you’re planning on buying a japanese book, you can simply upload the amazon.fr / amazon.it url to the ‘Where To Find’ section and it will generate the appropriate link.
If we end up incorporating all these, I wonder if it would be prudent to organize the Where to Find section into different categories of some kind? Especially with the upcoming Amazon links, it’s going to have the potential to become a monstrous list in a hurry.
Also maybe there could be a dropdown thingie of some kind? I fully understand that the providers are important for Natively and for the readers, but only once, while I usually look at a book’s page much more often, so having them a bit hidden would help me find what is most important most of the time.
When providing list of retailers for Spanish books, I think it might be important to list the ones that ship to Spain, the ones that ship to LA, and the ones that ship worldwide, instead of having to go to the book providers page or do the guess work by visiting the links!
Another ressource for Spanish is Elejandria. It has over a 1000 public domain / open licence ebooks in Spanish available for free. It’d be nice for those books on Natively to have a free tag as well.
