Bloggasm

Steve Weber, a writer who self-publishes how-to marketing books, logged onto his AmazonConnect account recently only to find that he couldn’t publish anything on it until he accepted a new user agreement from the online retail giant. Curious as to why he needed to agree to this new contract, he began to read through the extensive legalese that most internet users scroll through and ignore. Near the end, he came across the line “We … have no obligation to use, post or distribute your Submitted Materials. We may monitor and, in our discretion, remove your Submitted Materials at any time.” This rhetoric suggested that Amazon reserved the right to censor any blog posts published through AmazonConnect.

Weber doesn’t know whether this is a new addition to the user agreement, but he said that within the past year he has certainly experienced multiple instances in which Amazon has placed more stringent restrictions on his blogging at the site.

“When Amazon launched its Connect author-blog feature in 2006, chief executive Jeff Bezos hailed it as a new opportunity for authors to talk directly with readers,” Weber wrote recently on his blog. “Now, after a few million unfiltered blog posts, Amazon wishes authors would just shut up.”

Weber became a regular contributor to AmazonConnect almost from its inception, publishing his first posts there in February 2006. Over the next few years he found it incredibly helpful in marketing his books. “It’s so hard to tell exactly where your sales come from,” he explained. “But I could always tell that after I posted something, I could see my Amazon rank go way up. I could tell that people were reading it because I’d get emails from people saying, ‘Hey I saw this on your Amazon blog.’ A lot of people didn’t even know what a blog was, but they’d see it pop up somewhere on Amazon. It might be when they went to the home page; they didn’t necessarily have to go to one of my books, but the first line of the post would surface in all these different places, and now they’re kind of segregating it off, because I guess they’re tired of policiing it, or they don’t want to police it.”

To his dismay, Weber began noticing a series of changes to its blogger platform about a year ago, all of which seemed to place restrictions on his blogging. First, Amazon began truncating his posts. Before, he could publish up to 3,000 words per post and place it on a book’s products page, which came in handy when Amazon was slow to update a product description if the book had been revised or changed in some way.

“I think part of it was their realization that pages were just getting way too long,” he said. “So they just started truncating the posts, which people like me didn’t like because you know that 99% of the people just look at what’s right in front of them, they don’t click through to see the remainder. So they just started showing the first five lines or so of a post.”

The next change came a few months ago. When Weber first began blogging on AmazonConnect, he could choose which of his books’ pages he wanted a post to appear on. Given that some of his books focus on widely different topics, this allowed him to post on subjects that only pertained to a certain book. But now, Amazon has changed the platform so that a post appears on all the books by a particular author.

“That took away almost all the utility right there,” Weber said. “If you have to speak to all those different people at the same time, it’s just not worth it. And those people are going to get irritated because they don’t want to see stuff that’s off topic on the product page.”

There have been other subtle changes; I haven’t verified this independently, but Weber claimed that a few weeks ago Amazon stopped allowing new users to set up AmazonConnect blogs, and instead has rolled blogs into something called Author Pages. And earlier this month, Weber accused Amazon of censoring a customer review of one of his books simply because it mentioned a URL where it could be downloaded for free.

We learned from the AmazonFail fiasco that we should be cautious when making unsubstantiated claims about Amazon’s business practices, but either way it’s becoming clear that the retail giant is placing at least some new restrictions on its bloggers, moves that may result in non-relevant content being published on books’ product pages. Does this mean that frustrated authors will abandon their AmazonConnect blogs and return exclusively to their own websites? Or are the promotion opportunities too great to pass up? Based on the company’s dominance in the online bookselling market, I suspect that book publicists are not ready to give up AmazonConnect just yet.