Amazon.com v. Filedby.com: Service the Author — GO!
Amazon.com just launched their author store concept. Stephen King’s Amazon Author Store is here. (It makes me mental that Publisher’s Weekly doesn’t link out. I digress… ). Overdue isn’t? A single destination for all-things author related — why aren’t publishers here first? And it kills the momentum behind Shatzkin’s filedby.com initiative. Or does it? Amazon is the 10,000 pound gorilla of books on the web and filedby.com doesn’t appear to be optimized for search. Odds are authors (and the publishers that advise them) will flock to Amazon. Google and consumers are already there. Game. Set. Match. But wait! Amazon is a slow lumbering monolith. They don’t do responsive. They don’t do timely new features. They don’t do ease-of-use or dataportability. They are on their own schedule with their own agenda. An author centred service like filedby has a fighting chance if it swiftly captures author attention and participation.
A good place to start would be vanity urls for every author. I can’t believe amazon.com/stephen-king is 404. Get on that filedby, you can’t afford to make a wrong move now.
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