Sundry Items/amazon.com

I forgot yesterday to mention an interview I did on 1/31 over at Dineen Miller’s blog. Take a look if you haven’t already stopped by there. Dineen asked a few questions that, well, got me going.

In the near future I’ll have another interview up on Chris Wells’ site. I’ll let you know when that happens. Interestingly, Dineen and Chris asked completely different questions, which was quite refreshing.

Also, coming soon here, I want to give you another inside look at editing with a publishing house. Remember when I covered the macro edit for Violet Dawn? Well, guess what’s back on my desk, this time for copyedits. We’ll take a look at how this go-round is different from the last, and what makes a good copyedit, etc.

Oh, I want to remind you all of our discussion board (link at left). You’ve probably forgotten about it—because I know I had. For a while last year it was going good there, but I happened to check it for the first time in a couple months, and there’s an obvious lack of recent chatting. Frankly, it’s not a big issue to me whether you use it or not. I know plenty of other writing blogs offer message boards for discussion. But if you’d like to open up some topic, or perhaps continue a topic started here, please note that you’re doing so in a post comment, so BGs will know to mosey on over and take a look.

Now for today, here’s a bit of cool news from Publisher’s Weekly regarding amazon.com’s new venture:

The day before it is set to release results for 2005, Amazon announced another marketing initiative designed to drive traffic to its site. Amazon Connect will let authors post messages directly to their readers via the Amazon.com home page. Authors' posts will be limited to customers who have purchased that author's work in the past, or to those who sign up to receive that author's posts.

Amazon said about 1,000 authors have enrolled in the program. In addition to the Amazon.com home page, posts will appear on book detail pages, a blog page and on a special author profile page that features the author's three most recent posts and entire bibliography. In addition, customers can sign up to receive posts from authors whose books they have not previously purchased on Amazon.

I’m already in the process of signing up as an author.

It’s interesting to note that in the grand scheme of book sales, the Internet plays a very small percentage. According to the ECPA’s recent survey for sales of Christian books in 2004, the Internet came in at only 1.4% of sales. It does form a little larger percentage in the general market, but still not much.

But here’s the thing I notice with myself. I may not buy all the time from amazon, but I do use it as an information site. I can easily look up an author and everything he/she has written. And now much of the time I can read a few pages inside the books. This author thing sounds way cool to me as a reader. It will drive me to amazon.com more frequently now, I think.

I’d like to take an admittedly less than scientific poll here. Do you use amazon.com for information more than you use it for purchasing? If you use it for information, what kinds of info are you seeking? And—in this new Amazon Connect program—what kinds of information from an author would you like to see (if ya already didn’t know all her inside stories and read her blog every day, that is)?