Open Letter to Amazon.com Customer Discussions Feedback

November 5, 2005 by wfzimmerman | No comments

Dear Amazon.com Customer Discussions Feedback,

As a publisher of “meta” titles about books in the Amazon.com catalog — see my

UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK SEVEN NEWS
THE SOLOMON KEY AND BEYOND
UNAUTHORIZED A FEAST FOR CROWS ANALYSIS

I was thrilled to see the appearance of your Customer Discussions feature, since it appears to be well aligned with my publishing vision of providing detailed information for enthusiasts in concise, enjoyable formats.

As I’m sure you noticed I promptly posted to the relevant forums. I took the tack of providing straightforward informational posts that mention the existence of my books in the Amazon.com catalog, but I was careful to avoid crossing the line to what I would consider spam.

I hope that single posts of this nature do not rise to the level of what you would find an objectionable “campaign to promote an item in the Amazon.com catalog.” It seems inevitable that you will soon get a lot of people bombarding the forums with annoying and fat-fingered campaigns for books that have tenuous or no connection to the book at hand. I personally am not going there (too busy and too sensible) so I hope your policies will preserve a space for reasonable and minimally annoying references to highly relevant products.

Do you plan to provide the ability to hyperlink from forums to other objects in the catalog? That would certainly make a lot of sense from the poster’s point of view and one would think it would be revenue-positive for you (basically being a lower life form of BXGY co-op advertising).

Congratulations and good luck,

Fred

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