ccasionally people buy my books on Amazon and Smashwords – gratifying. The pocket change is nice. Of course, the entire reason this site exists is for me to peddle my books while attending more book shows, writing more books and being famous and all. Well, most of that didn’t happen but I have to admit, I enjoy blogging and posting every little bullshit that comes to mind.

But still, the minor monetization of the site is part of it, so for every posting (and I have thousands of them), I always add a link to my page with Amazon links.

Now, Amazon links allow you to put in some HTML into your site that makes a pretty picture of the bookcover, the current price and a nice handy button to go there and impulse buy. Great. Just what I needed. And I’ll admit that using their link was a pain in the ass since you needed to go into your page and adding it – not just plunking it there but switching your page into HTML format to see the nuts and bolts and carefully insert it where it needed to go. Real bomb-defusing tension there. I had to do it once on this new site a few years back and didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

So I was posting up something just after New Years and glanced at my page when grabbing the BookMark URL off my site and realized that all those Amazon links where gone. Huh? I’ve seen interruptions from their service before and just shrugged it off, but as days turned into weeks, nothing changed. I suspected that Amazon had changed their program again and I’d have to muck the shit some more.

I was wrong.

They didn’t change it. They removed it.

Now, as I mentioned in LAST WEEKS BLOG about my Trip Reports, I’m not all that comfortable with Pages. But I’d been talking about this and that with my Renascence friend Chris Strecker, who mentioned he was handy in WordPress. Told him what I needed and he said it would be easy to fix. Like me, he figured we’d just bypass Amazon all together. You can get a handy link to the product page (it’s still an associate thing you can do) and you can link that directly to the picture of your book. It’s not simple-easy, but it’s fairly-easy, especially when someone else does it. So we met over coffee and I brought out my computer and he fixed it all up, nice and neat.

And if you want to see the end product, go to the link below and see my new, improved, and less-dependent-on-Amazon Bookshelf.

Thanks, Chris!

>>>GO HERE TO SEE MY NOVELS. IN FACT, TEST THEM OUT BY CLICKING THROUGH AND PURCHASING ONE! THANKS!<<<