Using Amazon’s Author Central to Increase Sales

Readers who are interested in buying your e-book might look to see what else you’ve published or to find out more about you. By creating an author page through Author Central, you can reserve a tiny corner of Amazon where you can add everything from a biography to videos. This page can help cement readers’ interest by encouraging them to buy your e-book. If you have several books for sale, the author page can help readers find them too.

You can use Author Central to add extra information to your e-book’s page on Amazon (the page that readers visit to find out about, and buy, your e-book). Using Author Central, you can (for example) add extra formatting to your e-book’s blurb.

Signing up for Author Central

You need to have at least one e-book (or print book) published on Amazon in order to join Author Central. After your e-book is available, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://authorcentral.amazon.com .

2. Click the Join Now button on the right side of the page.

3. Sign in with your Amazon account.

4. Read and accept the terms and conditions, and then click Accept.

Amazon automatically searches for books listing you as the author.

5. Click the Yes, This Is Me link for every book that belongs to you; click No, I Am Someone Else for every book that isn’t yours.

You can add other books to your profile later.

Selecting a book creates your Author Central account, and Amazon sends you a confirmation e-mail labeled Author Central Registration Confirmation.

6. Click the link in the e-mail message to activate your account.

You may not see your author page appear on the Amazon site for as long as a week, while your identity is verified, but you can fill out your profile in the meantime, as described in the next section. (The verification process prevents authors from claiming another person’s book as their own.)

Filling out your Author Central profile

After you set up an Author Central account, click the Profile tab to see a Profile page similar to the one shown in Figure 13-8. Click the Add link in a section to add related information. When you click the link, you see instructions in a pop-up window and a box for entering the appropriate information.

The sections in the Author Central profile are described in this list:

Biography: Enter your biographical details in plain text — no bold, italics, or HTML code. Your bio appears on your author page, which you can visit using the link near the top of the screen, next to the Author Pages icon. (For me, that link is Visit Amazon’s Ali Luke page. Your link will obviously be slightly different, as it will include your own name.)

Any relevant qualifications are useful in your biography, as are your years of experience in a particular job, and you may want to share a little of your personal life, such as your spouse, kids, or pets. Biographies are commonly written in the third person, such as “Ali Luke lives in the UK” instead of “I live in the UK.”

Write at least 100 characters, or about 20 words. If you’re writing more than a few sentences, remember to press the Enter key to create paragraphs.

Blogs: If you have a blog, you can automatically publish your blog posts on your Amazon page. You need to add the URL of your RSS feed. For a WordPress.com blog, it’s usually your blog’s URL with /feed at the end. Mine, for example, is http://aliluke.wordpress.com/feed .

Events: If you’re attending a book launch or book signing, or if you’re speaking at a conference, you can add this information to your author page. Though the fields are self-explanatory, you need to select a book from the Book drop-down list (even if you have only one).

Author Page URL: By default, the URL of your author page looks like this: www.amazon.com/-/e/B006RIWB5G , which doesn’t look good on business cards (and is a nightmare to relay by phone). To spruce up the custom author page URL, you can create a customized (and more attractive) author page URL, such as www.amazon.com/aliluke .

Photos: The photos you add to your author page must be in JPG format and must meet the Amazon requirements (which are shown when you click the Add Photo link). You can use photos of yourself or photos that in some way represent you as an author. (For example, you might have a photo that relates to the topic of your books.) You must have permission to use the photo if someone else took it or if it includes other people.

Videos: You can add videos in most major formats, though they can be no longer than ten minutes and no larger than 500MB. You might like to make a video specifically for your author page, to talk about your e-book, read from it, or even create a screencast or instruction video if it’s nonfiction.

Twitter: If you have a Twitter account, you can display your tweets on your Amazon page. It can be a good way to encourage readers to find you on Twitter, but if you use your Twitter account mainly for personal chat, or if you rarely tweet about topics that relate to your e-book, you may prefer not to add it to your Amazon page.

You can edit your Amazon profile at any point if you decide to add, change, or remove information. Changes may take 30 minutes or so to appear live on your Amazon page.

When you edit your profile, you may want to edit the information that Amazon lists for your book, to have a way to include formatting in the book description. (When you set up an e-book on Kindle Direct Publishing, you can use only plain text in the book description.) To edit your e-book’s description, follow these steps:

1. Click the Books tab and then the title of your book.

Figure 13-9 shows an e-book with its KDP description, ready for editing.

2. Click the Editorial Reviews tab below the image of your e-book, and click the Edit button in the Product Description section.

3. Add bold or italics or whatever other type of formatting you want to help enhance your book’s description.

4. Click Preview to see how the new book description will look and then click Save Changes if you like it, or click Go Back to make alterations.

You can also use this page to include sections such as About the Author, to give readers more details about you and your qualifications for this particular book. If your e-book has been reviewed by newspapers, magazines, journals, or blogs, for example, you can copy these reviews into the Editorial Reviews section.

If you have multiple versions of your book (perhaps a paperback and hardback as well as your e-book), edit the product description for each one separately. Editing a single description has no effect on the pages for other versions of your e-book. You can switch between versions by clicking the Editions links on the right side of your book’s page within Author Central.