If you have published Amazon books, you should already be using your author page on Amazon to help your book marketing.
Many authors don’t realize how easy it is. If you haven’t set up your page yet, go to Author Central, and use your KDP username and password to log in to your Amazon author page.
Once you set up the basic information, click on the books tab to check your book listing.
If a book is missing, use the “claim your books” button to find your missing title. It will then appear within about 24 hours.
Every author is an international author
To promote your books to international markets, you can set up author pages on an international version of Amazon Author for the UK, Germany, France, and Japan.
There are a lot of book marketing tools you can use.
For a detailed description of how to optimize your pages, you can read this detailed tutorial on how to add a blog feed, add reviews, and modify fonts for your book description.
The Draft2Digital author page
However, there is a new way to create a beautifully designed author page that will add to your discoverability and possibly help book sales.
Draft2Digital (D2D) has been a breath of fresh air for many self-publishing authors. It’s an easy-to-use publishing service that has increased in popularity over the last couple of years due to its feature-rich publishing options.
The feature that stands out the most is the automatic updating of all the back matter on earlier titles.
This makes publishing a new title very easy, as all the back matter, and the new title is added to all previous titles.
You can read our earlier review of Draft2Digital.
While this and many other features make D2D an easy-to-use publishing service, there is one extra element that would be even more desirable.
Author discovery is still the biggest hurdle
It doesn’t matter if you self-publish on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Smashwords, Draft2Digital or use a publisher.
For all authors, the main obstacle to selling more books is discoverability.
How do readers find an author? If they can’t find you or stumble across you by some means, how can they possibly buy your Kindle ebooks and books?
Book promotion and marketing are by far the toughest parts of publishing a book. There are no shortcuts. The only way is to work constantly promoting your author brand.
There are so many avenues to follow up each day with online book promotion.
It is easy to be swamped by hundreds of social media posts and messages, writing new blog posts, answering emails, and hopefully, still having time to write.
Well, there is one new book promotion tool that will only take you a few minutes to set up and will add a little more power to your discoverability.
Draft2Digital now offers a stylish and (almost) automatic author page
Similar to Amazon Author Central pages, D2D’s free author page has a complete list of all books by an author, along with an author bio and image.
The service runs on D2D’s sister site, Books2Read, but integrates with all your book information from your D2D publishing platform.
But there are some interesting features that make this an even better page.
Some of the features of the author page include:
Your author bio
Your author photo
Links to your social media accounts
Customizable page elements to help promote your book to readers
A button that readers will be itching to click to follow you for new release notifications or to join your mailing list, pointing to the list signup tool of your choice
Carousels of your books and series, so readers can easily find your work
For each of your book pages, there are more features.
Your book and series titles
Your name as the author, with a link for readers to find more books by you
The cover image of your book
A customizable book description.
Customizable page elements to help promote your book to readers
A Buy Now button that uses Universal Book Links
Thumbnails of other books in the same series
Your author photo and bio, along with links and buttons for readers to follow you on social media. They can either sign up for your mailing list or be notified when you have new releases
If you are already publishing with D2D, you don’t need to create an author page. It’s already set up for you.
But if you are new to D2D, you will need to create an account.
When I accessed my new author page, there were only a couple of things I had to do. One was to add a profile picture, and the other was to add my social media links.
There is a facility to add a link to your mailing list, but for the moment, I haven’t done this.
So after making these two edits, my author page was ready to go.
What I like about the D2D author page is the look.
It looks stylish and modern and has smooth and appealing parallax scrolling. It organizes all my titles by series, compilation editions, and stand-alone titles.
The one feature I would like to see is the ability to choose the book title, which is used in the header of the author page.
Currently, it is set to the last book published. I would prefer to be able to set one of my better-selling titles.
When I asked D2D about this, I was told that this feature is under consideration. Fingers crossed.
Why is another free author page good news?
In itself, another author page might not seem all that exciting.
However, there are very good SEO benefits to having a well-designed author page on D2D and also on your author central account on Amazon.
Any page that includes all your book titles, book descriptions, and author bio is more great metadata, and it will assist in gaining organic search results and discovery traffic for you.
It is easy to overlook the power of Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engine traffic when social media is so active and in front of your eyes all day long.
But SEO is powerful, so any opportunity to increase SEO discoverability is a good investment of your time.
In this case, a D2D author page will more than likely be indexed by Google. But to give it a little SEO nudge, you should add a link to it from your blog, website, or social media.
External links to a page are an important factor in Google ranking. So the more links you can get to your D2D page, the better it will perform for you as an author discover page.
The only features that are missing from the new D2D author page are the ability to add blog feeds and editorial reviews. These are both available on Author Central. Perhaps these will come in the future.
Conclusion
There is no reason not to use a D2D author page, and plenty of reasons why you should.
Any promotion tool, especially one for free, that helps in discoverability and sales rank is a useful addition for authors.
Take the few minutes you will need to make the few minor edits that are necessary, and you are good to go.
If you are new to Draft2digital, the following video will walk you through what you need to do.
Related Reading: Personal Branding For Authors Is The Best Promotion Tool You Have
Getting ready to publish my third book and every bit of marketing will help! Heading over now to get my account set up. Thanks! ~Elle
Thank you. I appreciate the review of Draft2Digital. I don’t know if it’s just on my computer (I use Safari and a Mac), but the social share buttons on the left cover at least the first two words of the entire page. I have to keep scrolling to get the text out of the way of the share buttons – a bit inconvenient.
The buttons shouldn’t cover the text unless you have zoom set. But I will check our settings. Thanks for letting me know.
D2D was one of the things I had on my list to check out this year. I’d better get on with it!
As one who has been using D2D for a while now, I can only say that I have been well pleased with them. Any questions I have asked them have been answered in a short time. In general I cannot fault this site.
I agree.
Thanks for sharing about a platform that is new to me, Derek!