Quite a bit of chatter in the writing and publishing worlds about the demise of Amazon Connect. From my post to pod_publishing:
My more optimistic view on the demise of AmazonConnect is that everything about Amazon’s bookstore is a giant data mining experiment. If they remove a feature, or make it less prominent, it is because, over the whole store, it is not paying its way.
Now, this is from their point of view, not ours — so a feature could increase sales (good for us) but be extremely expensive (bad for them) and therefore be killed (bad for us).
The feature could also be good for some authors (maybe even including those of us who liked blogging to the detail pages) but not for most, and therefore be killed (bad for us).
On the whole, though, I think this is a place to apply the Copernican principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_principle
The most likely situation is that we do not occupy a privileged position in the universe, and that, in fact, Amazon Connect was not doing us much good, and has been replaced by a service, Author Central, that Amazon’s data shows to be more cost-effective on the whole.
This same chain of logic is why I always use SITB for my books. If a feature persists on Amazon over the long period, it is almost certain that their data shows that it drives sales over the whole store.
As I say in the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook, I strongly encourage authors to sign up for Amazon Connect, because it is the only way that you can post real-time directly to the detail page for your book. Not only that, but you can direct posts specifically to everyone who has bought any of your other books, separately or all together.
Unfortunately, Amazon Connect provides a very cumbersome experience for authors, which requires them to go through a far from intuitive “verification” process, and my experience is that signing up with Connect (especially the verification process) has defeated all but the most dogged and technically savvy authors.
I have finally figured out a work-around that will let us communicate directly with your readers via Amazon Connect. What I do is set up an email account for you at NimbleBooks.com (e.g. Author.Name@nimblebooks.com), then use that to sign up with Amazon Connect as you. Then I verify the titles as myself, and go back to Amazon Connect as you so that I can post on your behalf. Obviously, this has the drawback that I am doing some of the work for you (and as you!). But the good news is that once you are set up with Connect, I can give you the e-mail address and Connect login, and from that point on it will be very easy for you to use Connect as yourself.
Let me know if you want me to help with this.
Notes:
- You can only sign up for Connect once you have at least one book in print on Amazon and available with a “Buy” (from Amazon) button.
- Not sure whether you already have a Connect account? Sign in to Amazon.com/Connect with your “normal” account that you use for shopping. That’s probably what you used.
- Connect is not the same as an Amazon Profile (which you get when you buy books or write reviews) — instead, it is like an extra module attached to a “no frills” Profile. When I set up a Connect account for you with a NimbleBooks.com e-mail address, it creates a Profile with no credit card or other personal information attached, just your name and bibliography.
- Because the {author.name}@NimbleBooks.com Profile has no credit card or personal info, there is no privacy risk to you.
- This process may somehow be folded into or somehow subsumed by Amazon Author Stores, but for now there is an indefinite waiting list for Author Stores, and Author Stores does not (so far) offer the option of direct connection to the detail page. So far the Author Store is a rather lame page of programmatically generated lists without any human touch — see, for example, the Stephen King store.
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