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A new service from Amazon.com lets authors connect with their fans by posting extra content about their books or forthcoming works.

There's no RSS feed, and no comments either, marketing guru Andy Beal told ClickZ about Amazon Connect. It's a new program aimed at bringing in authors and encouraging them to put more content on Amazon's site.

ClickZ called them "author blogs," but they are missing the interactivity and feed publishing of blogs as Beal noted. Without them the Connect feature is just one-way content, something people have turned away from as they reduce their media consumption of newspapers and TV programs.

Amazon has made serious efforts toward embracing the growing interactivity dynamic. Recently, Amazon's Alexa search engine made the news when Amazon announced it would open the Alexa index to developers and charge for CPU and storage rather than on a per-query basis.

Getting published authors to blog could pose another challenge. Professional authors tend to be busy writing new books, though a few notables like Jerry Pournelle and Neil Gaiman do blog regularly. In fact, Pournelle has done so since 1998; Amazon will have to find authors just as willing to take on the extra content creation work to help Connect connect with users.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.