Authors Blog For Free on Amazon

If you are the author of a book, ebook or audio product available on Amazon.com, you can have a blog on the Amazon site through Amazon Connect.

Amazon Connect can bring more people to your product page where they can learn about and buy your book, it can inform customers about your upcoming events and new products, and it can lead Amazon customers to your web site or blog.

Your Amazon Connect blog will display on your product detail page. It will also be shown to customers who have purchased your books from Amazon in the past, and others who choose to subscribe.

The best part? It is easy and free. Here is all you have to do.

You will need to have an Amazon customer account. You probably already have one, but if you do not then go to http://www.Amazon.com/ and sign up.

Next, go to http://www.Amazon.com/connect and click on the “Sign up now” button.

You will have to answer some basic questions, and identify the products you are claiming as yours. Amazon will also want to verify that you are in fact the author of these books. You will be asked to provide contact information for your publisher, agent, publicist, distributor or other party who can verify your identity. I am self-published, so I pointed out that the email address on the account I was registering with Amazon Connect was the same as the email address on my Amazon Advantage account. They accepted that as verification.

Once your account is approved, just log in to http://www.Amazon.com/connect to start posting to your blog. Creating a post is as simple as writing something in Word, and you can add media such as pictures and video.

Posting is even easier if you already have a blog. Just enter the RSS feed at Amazon Connect and your Amazon blog will automatically update each time you add a post to your other blog. You can see this on my product detail page for The Mystery Shopper’s Manual. The RSS feed from my mystery shopper blog automatically sends my blog posts to the Amazon page.

Another use for Amazon Connect is to put video on your product page. Of course, if you want the video to stay on the page, you may choose not to use the RSS feed from your blog in Amazon Connect, because new blog posts will push the older ones off the page. An alternative would be to periodically post new videos or periodically repost the old videos to Amazon Connect.

Having a free blog on Amazon is a simple and free way to promote and sell more books.

Cathy Stucker is the author of The Mystery Shopper’s Manual and many other books. You can learn more about mystery shopping at her mystery shopper blog.