'Amazon Connect' allows authors to post directly to readers

Authors can now post messages about their book on its product page at Amazon.com and even host a blog on Amazon's site.

Signing up for Amazon Connect also enables authors to post a bibliography on their Amazon profile page. Messages show up on the book's detail page and the author's profile page.

This is a good step for Amazon, but so far the move appears tentative. For example, there's no direct link from a book's product page to the blog. The blogs have no RSS feeds, and if you search for "blogs" on Amazon, you won't find anything except books about blogging. A directory of blogs would be useful.

Nevetheless, Connect could be a powerful new way for authors to build relationships with new readers who stumble onto their book's Amazon page.

Many authors are skeptical of the program: "Why should I write a blog on Amazon, when I have my own blog? Why give free content to Amazon instead of putting it on my own domain?" Good question. My answer is, you should explore all avenues for wider exposure to readers. Some author-published blogs (even the good ones) have very little traffic. One reason is that their blog doesn't get indexed by Google very well -- or if it does, it's not assigned a decent Google Page Rank. And so these blogs aren't returned in the top search results, even when there's an exact keyword match. That cripples search-engine traffic.

Amazon's Connect program could lift your blog out of the Web's backwaters. Since the author posts on Amazon are crawled by all the major search engines *and* is hosted on a major Web site (Amazon is the 12th most popular Web destination), authors and their blogs could get tons more exposure.

And you don't necessarily have to give away all your good stuff on your Amazon blog. Amazon doesn't want you to simply repost content that's already on your blog. But you could post summaries to your best blog posts, along with a link directly to your site.

For more information, see this post on Slashdot.