Amazon.com as a Research Tool
A mazon.com is a fascinating place to visit. To be quite honest, I spend too much money there—enough that my Prime membership has paid for itself. But its a great place, even if you don’t spend a dime. For the author, it contains a lot of useful information. The first thing we notice is that it gives us a relative index of how popular particular books are. If you are looking for the most accurate and most up to date bestseller list, Amazon.com has it and you can filter it down to pretty much any category you would want. Another thing Amazon.com is useful for is as a means to look at product descriptions. You can walk through Barnes and Noble, pull some books off the shelf and read the backs, but it is much easier to do it on Amazon.com. Besides, Amazon.com has several times the selection of Barnes and Noble. If you are writing non-fiction, Amazon.com makes it fairly easy to find similar books to the one you are writing. With that information, you can then tell any agent you quer...