On TechCrunch (@TechCrunch), Sarah Lacy writes how Amazon is “increasingly offering small features here and there that taken together may start to make a traditional publisher a lot less necessary for authors.”
Amazon recently integrated with Facebook to allow people with Amazon accounts to “like” books. This may seem laughably obvious or passe, but with so much inventory on Amazon, having a high vanity number like “likes” could actually help move sales. As is, the number of reviews makes a huge difference in purchase conversion. Likes is a far easier way to get people to interact with a title and spread it around the Web.
In addition, Amazon’s author pages have the basic social networking features made super easy. For instance you can import your existing blog via RSS and simply click thumbnails of books with your name to select the titles you’ve actually written. It uses your consumer Amazon account to vet that you are really who you say you are, and within minutes, all of the data, reviews and sales figures of your books are imported into your account.