How Can I Put Amazon Book Reviews On My Site?

[Truegho]

Does anybody know how I can place Amazon book reviews on my site? Not having much luck with the conventional table of Amazon thumbnail book covers, sadly!

[Beagle]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Do you mean actual reviews from the amazon site? Check the operating agreement to be sure, but I think amazon affiliates can use reviews that are written by amazon staff - just be sure to credit them properly. Since amazon doesn't hold the copyright to customer-written reviews, they can't legally give affiliates permission to use them. If you're talking about "feeds," IMVHO those wouldn't work very well for such a specific niche [ETA: I just reread your post and see you don't mention your niche, but I assumed it from your other threads] - but there might be a way to use them that I don't know about.

A lot of people have the most luck writing their own reviews; there are also ways with, say, a blog or a simple CMS, to let your visitors add their own comments and reviews. In general, text links seem to work better than the "thumbnail" ones. Check the link building section of the associates' site for instructions on text links, and for other ideas that might work for you, such as the "link to any page" options. You can get pretty creative with some of those.

My main amazon-using site isn't in your niche, but I wouldn't be surprised if we shared some audience members. I certainly write and publish reviews, but I've found some other things to be even more useful:

For any article that you publish, if possible include some links to books that readers could look to "for more information" or "for background on this story" or "for more books by [name]" (a great one for using the "link to search results" option), etc., etc.

And I've found that in a specific niche with dedicated followers, a full book/DVD/whatever review isn't always as important as keeping on top of what's causing "buzz" (maybe not in the population at large, but among members of the niche group), what's new and upcoming (I make a lot of my amazon commissions through pre-orders), and, especially, in getting those things in front of your site visitors as quickly as possible, before they've bought them somewhere else. Hype doesn't have to be dishonest. If it's exciting, if it's what they've been waiting for - say it! My niche is probably even a bit more "literary" than yours, but even though I use reviews, articles and essays with links to books, and a "store", I make about half of my amazon sales straight from my What's New page.

[Also ETA: Consider this a "combined" post for your three threads here.]

[edited by: Beagle at 12:43 am (utc) on April 10, 2007]