Q&A: How can I blog about my book on Amazon.com?

QUESTION: How can I contact Amazon to get permission to post an author's blog on my book's product page? Can I control which of my books the blog posts will appear?

ANSWER: It's fairly easy to enroll in Amazon's blogging program, Amazon Connect, but it might take a couple of weeks before you're ready to blog.

First, go to your Amazon profile. Scroll about halfway down the page to the section called "Your Bibliography." Click the link at the top, "edit this list."

Here you can search for your titles by name, title or ISBN. When you find the desired title, click on the "Add" button, and it will move to the "Your Titles" column. You'll see a button for "specify verifier." They're asking for a contact at your publisher to verify that you're indeed the author of the book. Self-publishers can identify themselves as the "verifier."

It can take several days for the title to get approved. For my most recent title, I had to e-mail a reminder to Amazon (at connect-help@amazon.com) after they neglected to send the verifier e-mail after 10 days.

Once you've got book(s) enrolled in Connect, when you send a blog post you can specify which book(s) the post should appear with.

Here's more background info on Amazon Connect (see the last section on the page).

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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Turning your blog into a book

Many blog writers turn their posts into a full-fledged book. Chris Anderson posted much of the content for his business bestseller The Long Tail on his blog by the same name.

There's even a word for it, blook, which means a bound book originally published serially on a blog, such as Julia Powell's Julie & Julia.

Since blogs became popular a few years ago, there have been several tools for converting your blog into a book, Blurb being perhaps the most well known.

Now another blog-to-book tool is entering the market, Blog2Print. It's billed as a "one-click" solution for turning your blog into a book. Then you simply upload a cover photo and confirm which posts should appear in what order. So far it works only with Google's Blogger platform.

Anyone who's actually written a book is probably skeptical of these blog-to-book services. Sure, a blog is great for generating and refining ideas. But pouring unedited blog posts into a book is a little like throwing table scraps into a blender and calling it a gourmet shake. Your dog might eat it, but you're not going to fool anyone else.

But just for the sake of argument, let's imagine someone does manage to compile a wonderful book from a blog. The pricing of these services is a show-stopper. Pricing at Blog2Print starts at $19.95 for a 20-page four-color book. It's about a dollar less at Blurb. A paperback with 300 pages costs $59.95!

These services might attract a small number of people who want to print a vanity coffee table book. But anyone who's got material for a commercial book will see too many downsides.

Plug your book with a blog tour

If you haven't yet discovered Tom Masters' Future Perfect Publishing blog, you should pay a visit. It's a new blog, but Tom has already managed to come up with some great material. He's a Web marketing consultant and president of the Book Publishers Northwest, the regional affiliate of Publishers Marketing Association.

Tom interviewed me recently about blog tours (sometimes called "virtual author tours"), and you can read our conversation here:

I think a lot of people are catching on to this method of marketing, in the book industry and in other areas. Consumers just don’t pay much attention to traditional advertising anymore. You’ve got to show up at the places where they are already discussing something that matters to them, like blogs.

2007 Blooker prize winners announced

Lulu announced the winners of its second annual Blooker Prize. Each entrant was originally written serially on a blog and later repackaged as a book.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq, by Colby Buzzell, has topped 110 entries from 15 countries to win the 2007 Lulu Blooker Prize. It is the frank account of post-invasion Iraq as blogged directly from the war zone. Winning the Fiction category is The Doorbells of Florence by British blogger Andrew Losowsky. This book of short stories based on photographs was self-published through Lulu.com. Rounding out the awards is Comics category winner Mom's Cancer by Brian Fies. Originally an Eisner Award-winning webcomic, it is the true-life account of his mother's struggle with metastatic lung cancer.

Amazon buries author content with avalanche of advertising

After a year of experimentation, Amazon.com has killed the "Plogs" that featured author blog posts directly on its home page. In its place is Amazon Daily, which buries author-generated content under an avalanche of marketing blurbs written by Amazon employees.

Amazon launched the Plogs feature with great fanfare in February 2006. Its mission was enabling authors to "post messages directly to their readers via the Amazon.com home page." Alas, it seems Amazon decided this wasn't such a great idea after all.

With Plogs, customers who bought a book from a participating author were automatically subscribed to that author's AmazonConnect blog. The new Daily also appears at the top of Amazon's home page, but author content is as hard to find as a needle in a haystack. In its place are pitches for DVDs, electronics, liquor dispensers, reality TV shows, and occasionally a book or two.

Amazon calls the changes an "upgrade," a classic example of corporate double-talk. It's not an "upgrade" to replace authentic writing on a blog with schlock, spin and thinly disguised advertising. Undoubtedly this will kill any customer interest in reading author posts. I don't use my Tivo to record commercials, and people don't read blogs to find advertising.

Amazon Daily, unlike Plogs, is available to all Amazon visitors, whether you're signed in or recognized as a customer or not. You can customize the feature to delete content you don't want and to add content you're interested in. But no author-generated content has found its way into my Amazon Daily yet, even though I've added authors. All I get is the junk. Perhaps this is a glitch, or maybe Amazon prefers it this way.

The Plog feature was a combination of the words "product" and "blog." Each Amazon customer received a unique Plog based on their purchasing history. If Amazon received complaints from customers about receiving irrelevant posts from authors, it's not saying.

Amazon yanks author 'Connect' blogs and some customer reviews

On Saturday Amazon.com deleted the Amazon Connect blogs that authors use to post commentary on the product pages of their books, and the company posted a cryptic message that the program was undergoing "changes."

UPDATE: I've been informed that Amazon notified some publishers via e-mail last week that Connect would be upgraded and restored by Wednesday.

On author profile pages like mine, the Amazon connect posts currently don't appear at all. Before the weekend, the most recent blog posts had appeared at the top of the profile page. On the author profiles, there's no explanation for the deleted blog posts. However, after navigating to the URL for a Connect blog, the the following message appears:

Amazon's blogs are temporarily unavailable. We're making big changes, so please try again later.

Amazon Connect has been highly popular with authors, many of whom use the program to appeal directly to their audience from Amazon's product page.

It's possible that Amazon is clarifying the rules for acceptable content for Connect posts. For example, many authors have been posting lengthy, unlicensed quotations from book reviews published elsewhere. Amazon requires such reviews to be abbreviated to 20 words or less to fit its interpretation of the "Fair Use" exemption under copyright law.

Also, within the past week, some authors have also reported that customer reviews have been deleted from their book pages, although it's unclear whether the deletions are simply a technical glitch or part of Amazon's revamping of the Connect program. In some cases, authors suspect that Amazon has begun deleting reviews for books which contain wording deemed "inappropriate."

BlogBurst could provide breakthrough for book bloggers

Thousands of book authors have already discovered the publicity power of content syndication through article-submission sites such as EzineArtlices.com. This week a new model for content syndication debuts, and could revolutionize the way blogs and author Web sites are exposed to the broader public.

BlogBurst went live on May 2, and you can see some of its first content being carried by major U.S. newspapers. See the San Francisco Chronicle's travel section -- about halfway down this page is the box Travel Blog Posts.

If it performs as its founders hope, BlogBurst may become the Web's first blog-based wire service for blogs, as the Baltimore Sun called it. It will provide blog content the same way the Associated Press provides material today for newspaper pages and Web sites.

Just imagine the traffic rush at your book blog if your posts were carried on the New York Times Book Review site and other relevant content sites.

BlogBurst has about 700 bloggers signed up, and it appears they've been well screened. The content is well written and the sites have a professional appearance. No spam here.

In addition to the Chronicle, a number of big newspaper companies have already agreed to begin using the content, including Gannett, the Houston Chronicle the Austin American-Statesman, and The Washington Post. If the idea works with them you can expect more papers to sign up with BlogBurst in a hurry.

A number of newspapers Web sites have launched their own blogs as a way to attract new readership and make their Web sites more compelling. What BlogBurst brings to the table is a more diverse array of talent and the possibility of an endless menu of niche content -- the kind newspapers could never afford if they had to pay for it. If the blog content proves popular with newspaper readers, it could make their Web sites a lot more sticky.

BlogBurst will sell advertising and split is with the newspapers and bloggers, though the precise details haven't been made public.

Here's an ABC News video on BlogBurst.

'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.