Building an Amazon Author’s profile on the Amazon Author Central
This weekend I took the liberty of going through the new Amazon author central. About a year ago, Amazon issued out a press release that the they’d created a better and easier to use Author Central and invited the author’s on Amazon to take advantage and have better control of the information that appears on their Amazon information page.
I had done this a while ago. Well, in all honesty, it had to be about 2006 or 2007 when I had initially done this.
Amazon.com changed … a lot… but the good news is that my email and password were still the same for the amazon author central.
First off, lets go to:
https://authorcentral.amazon.com/
If you have an old account you can sign in using your email and password.
If you don’t, create one and go through the prompts of getting an account.
Once you’re in setting up the profile should only take no more than fifteen to thirty minutes.
They even give you quick set up links.
BOOK TAB
Upload all your books that are available on Amazon. Automatically your Kindle books connect to these – unless you’ve done them by a different publisher or program. In that case, add them as well.
PROFILE TAB
You can upload as many photos as you like, but always make sure a picture of your face is number one. You can click on the manage after you’ve added all your photos in the profile tab.
Your personal biography is what you want your readers or potential readers to know about you. It’s not going to be about a particular story you wrote. Make your bio about you and your passion for writing and for your life that you want people to know about.
Your RSS feeds from your main blogs are really important. You want your readers or even potential readers who want to know more about you, to be able to see what you’re talking about.
(This is why it’s very important to have your blog updated all the time.)
Note: You can upload as many blog RSS’s as you like, but remember it will only load up new posts. If you haven’t done a post on your blog in a while, now is a good time.
VIDEO TAB
You can only upload one video at a time. Suggestions: a book trailer, video interview or even a book signing.
Here are some examples that would be great to have on your page:
Book signing of Reshonda Tate Billingsley in Detroit
Book Trailer of Stealing Innocence Series by Sylvia Hubbard
EVENTS TAB
Of course keeping your readers abreast of things is always a good thing.
I always add annual events that I do to make it easier on the reminder department for me though.
New Note:
You can post your events on this page and if your name is listed in their discussion forum, Amazon will actually link the page to your page.
I also want to let you know you can now add twitter and there are a lot more changes to come to your amazon page, including letting your readers contact you on twitter through their kindle. Plus with the recent developments with the Kindle and additions, look for more readers to interact with the author and of course, more downloads of your product!!
New Note added 12/04/11
Now you can add your own URL as well. See Phyllis Zimbler Miller article on this: http://www.millermosaicllc.com/amazon/more-changes/
In conclusion….
You can do a lot more at Amazon Author Central as well.
At the end of your Home page on Amazon Author Central, you can enroll your books in the Kindle program, Join the search inside the book program and be an Amazon Associate.
In the end, you have a great page and can use this as a great way to get more out of Amazon.
A great book to get the full potential of selling books on Amazon is by Steve Weber.
If you know new things that have happened and would love to help me keep this article updated, please feel free to add comments. If comments are closed, and you’d like to leave feedback for the author, please fill out the form.
Very necessary post as many don’t know about it and linking to blogs and booktour etc. Even though I know this, reading the post made me check up on my author page and I realized the links for my revised edition and kindle book are actually messed up when you click on my name. So now I gotta fix that. Thanks for making me take a second look at it. I also finally added RSS from my blogs as they had sent out this email that their own blog would be going away anyway but I had not gotten to it…
Wow- Sylvia, this definitely some helpful information- and so easy to follow. Thank you and much success on your writing endeavors…
thank you Sheila! Just sharing the knowledge!
In just a matter of five minutes with your helpful information, I have updated my author page on all the names I’ve written under. Thanks for the ABC, 123 tutorial.
Aww, thanks Joy!! I’m glad I could be of help!