An Open Letter to Amazon.com pt. 1
Dear Amazon.com:
Wow. What’s it been, a decade of buying books from you? That’s amazing. You are probably the only brand with which I’ve had that long and consistent of a relationship.
All things considered it’s been great. So great that I was among the first in virtual line on Monday to pre-order a Kindle 2.
However, when I look back at my last ten or so years of buying books from you, surprisingly little has changed.
I know it’s easy to criticize in a vacuum, but I love books so much that I can’t help but offer a few thoughts and suggestions.
With the entire book industry going through layoffs and generally just falling apart, you have a huge opportunity on your hands to not only evolve how people buy and consume books, but how books come to market and authors promote themselves.
I follow many of my favorite authors on Twitter. I also read their blogs. Why? Because I’m hungry for more information about what is going on in their lives and what’s in their heads. A lot of my interest is related to news regarding new publications and releases, but I also want to know what other authors they are reading. When they post their reading recommendations I buy them religiously. Usually from your site.
I know that you’ve tried things like author videos for book launches in the past, but I think they were too few and far between to create awareness and habit among your consumers. A few high profile authors posting videos on a site that contains hundreds of thousands of books isn’t the way to usher in a new paradigm for book launches. The chances of someone stumbling across one and being interested enough to watch it is too slim.
Instead what if you created an integrated platform for authors to communicate and interact with their audiences? You’ve already begun creating “author pages” for some of your more popular selling writers. Instead of having this just be a page with all of their releases, why not open at least part of this page up to be a communication platform for writers?
Why would authors participate? Authors have already embraced new ways of promoting themselves and their books. Their audiences have shown they are interested in interacting with them. Certainly author blogs and twitter feeds haven’t hit the mainstream, but that is in large part an awareness problem. With the built in traffic you have coming to your site, these self-promotional efforts would be greatly amplified immediately. Your site has the power to make these author/audience social interactions mainstream.
What’s in it for you? Besides the obvious advantage of having authors create content for you and promote their own books, authors like George Pelecanos have shown they would discuss a lot more than just their own books. As I’ve previously said I (and I’m sure plenty of others) consider my favorite author’s recommendations solid gold. Pelecanos is great at providing a running list of whatever he is reading, but also frequently recommends music and movies as well. Can you imagine having authors cross sell not only books, but also movies and music for you?
Which brings us to the larger issue of how books are recommended on your site.
Certainly you’ve mastered the whole recommendation engine thing. There are few sites, if any, that do it better. However, algorithmic recommendations have become less and less relevant as social media has come into prominence.
Listmania has for a long time been your version of peer recommendations. Listmania was great when it first came out, but now it has devolved to something I consider closer to spam. There are so many lists compiled by so many anonymous people whose opinions I often don’t trust or disagree with that they have basically become useless to me.
What I would find more meaningful is getting recommendations and inspiration from a smaller set of people. More like a social shopping model, or the Netflix Friends functionality, I would like to have a few trusted people that have extremely similar buying habits that I can then “follow” and interact with.
Once, about five years ago I accidentally clicked into a feature where I could browse the entire purchase history of an anonymous fellow shopper whose buying habits were similar to mine. That functional door quickly slammed shut, probably for privacy reasons, but the glimpse of it that I had showed me the power of delving deeper into the shopping habits of my peers and left me wanting more.
A social shopping/friends functionality like this could work in concert with the “Customers Who Bought This Item also Bought” functionality you already have, but take it a level deeper. The “Customers Who Bought” feature is useful to a certain point, but often recommends books that are too close in, i.e. books that I already know about or have, or offers up recommendations that stray outside my area of interest. Allowing me to more closely align myself with users that have a stronger connection to my own interests would certainly get me spending more time on your site and buying more books, music, and movies.
Continued in Part 2: More Thoughts on Community & Wishing for a Better Wish List
