I officially become an AmazonConnect Author.

If you regularly read these blogs, you may recall my rant against Amazon.com a few months ago. I was POed because Amazon offers free “Super Saver” shipping but, when you choose it, they delay your order. In my case, they tried to delay it for two months. Then, when I complained, they sent half my order and never sent the rest. The incident convinced me to switch to BN.com for my book buying needs. Their free shipping orders are shipped promptly and in full.

Unfortunately (or in some cases, fortunately), BN.com’s Web site lacks many of the features of Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, it lacks a decent Wish list feature. On BN.com, your wish list is yours alone and can’t be shared with others. How idiotic is that? My Amazon.com Wish List, however, can be shared with a link on a Web page or by e-mail. What better way to ensure that I get what I want for Christmas or my birthday each year?

Fortunately, BN.com lacks all the marketing junk that Amazon.com is constantly throwing at shoppers. I’m talking about recommendations, member lists, “the page you made,” and “also bought” lists. Sheesh. When are those guys going to give it up already? What really irks me is how often I connect and get a recommendation for a book that directly competes with one of mine.

The other day, I logged in to look up the availability of a book I heard about on NPR. Amazon recognized me immediately from one of the cookies it had stored in my computer. And it displayed what it calls a “plog” with a series of blog posts from a woman I’d never heard of. Turns out, this woman is an author and she evidently wrote a book that Amazon.com thinks I bought. (I don’t recall buying the book; it’s about new age healing and I don’t believe in most of that stuff.) The blog entries were of a “here’s what’s new” and “here’s how you can learn more about my books” nature — marketing through and through. I found the link sequence to make them go away.

There was also a link on my page that invited me to be one of the blogging authors. I guess they matched my name with names in their book database. (Enough to recognize me as an author, but not enough to stop recommending competing books. Oh, well.) I followed a bunch of links and got myself registered as an author with my own AmazonConnect blog.

i’m not sure how this works. It seems to me that if I write a blog entry, it might appear on pages for everyone who has purchased one of my books. Now although Amazon.com lists 68 titles for me, I only claimed about 10 as mine — no sense doing virtual paperwork for out-of-print titles. So I think that if you bought one of those 10 books and connected to your Amazon.com account, you might just see a blog entry from me.

Anyone out there qualified to try this? If you bought one of my books on Amazon.com, do try logging in to see if they push some of my prose at you. Then report back here, please, and use the Comments link to let us know.

Now this means I need to contribute to yet another blog. Just when I thought that I’d combine a bunch of my sites to reduce my blogging workload, there’s another blog to write for. But don’t worry — I won’t write nearly as much or as often there as I do here. And I won’t fill it with marketing bull.

There’s enough of that on Amazon without me adding to it.