Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel award just doesn’t do it for me. I’m looking through the Kindle bestsellers list and except for the Kindle Cookbook there are no self published books there. Meanwhile David Cook and David Archuleta (both American Idol alumni) are #4 and #11 on the BillBoard Top 200 Albums Chart. What we really need is an American Idol type user driven competition that leverages Oprah, television and/or radio, and most of all lets users be the experts. The ABNA doesn’t have enough sex appeal. I don’t know anything about the authors and there’s little to no involvement.
Here are the things that need to change -

1. It shouldn’t be the experts deciding the final winner – it should be the readers. Let the experts pick out 25 people who they think could be the next great author. And after that let the readers read their excerpts and/or full books and vote for who stays and who goes.  
2. This’ll also buy all these authors a lot of publicity and lay the foundation for them becoming a brand. There’s a reason 3 or so American Idol participants get record deals each year. 
3. Develop a great story for the competition itself – what are we trying to do? The Search for the next Great American Author? Giving readers the power to choose? Just have fun with reading? Which Blogger gets a book contract?
4. Bring in Oprah - Oprah for reaching out to one set of people. The kindle readers forming another audience, and finally, amazon customers a third audience. Pick 1 or more of these audiences.
5. There has to be a chance for readers to establish a one to one connection with authors. Who they are, their lives, and so forth. We want to hear their story, not just read their books.  
6. The voting dimension is something that isn’t totally clear to me. Perhaps it’s a new chapter of each author’s book being revealed every week. Perhaps it’s a new short story every week. Perhaps it’s just voting, or measuring purchases.
7. There is already an established pattern here – mentions on Oprah ignite sales, people always search for information about people they hear about on the news, see on TV, and so forth. Using TV to sell books is an idea crazy enough to work.

Amazon, a competition like this would get the Kindle more publicity than even Oprah’s recommendation (provided of course it’s a hit). Users would know what the Kindle is, authors everywhere would see the impact it could have, and you get to promote 25 authors on a grand scale. Let’s try it out.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | kindle idol, vs abna