How To Use Author Central And Your Amazon Author Page
Amazon Author Central is an essential tool for all Amazon authors.
From Author Central, you can improve your Amazon Author Page and your book sales page. If you are not using it, you are missing out on a huge bookselling opportunity.
When you first publish your paperback or Kindle ebook on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you only get the chance to enter the essential but basic details of your book.
Your Amazon book page or sales page will include your cover and book description. But it will be unformatted and very plain.
Author Central has so many tools to help you sell more books
Many authors don’t realize that there is so much more you can do to enhance your book sales pages on Amazon.
Publishing is one thing but making a book sales page stand out and work for you to help you sell books in another.
Author Central is a crucial part of book promotion and marketing and improving your author brand.
Books published by traditional publishing houses always have enhanced Amazon book sales pages. The same tools are available for self-published authors.
Amazon completely redesigned Author Central in 2020, and it is now very easy to use.
Let’s look at what you can do to make your sales page more attractive to book buyers.
Do you have a “Follow the Author” button on all your book sales pages?
If you don’t, you are missing out on an excellent book marketing tool. It is an outstanding chance to connect with readers and give them more information about you and your books.
The button will be highly visible positioned right below your book cover.
All you need to do to get this button is to open your Author Central account. You can usually use your KDP account or your Amazon account login details. Now you can create your author profile.
Once you have logged in, you can start setting up your Amazon author page.
Click on the “Profile” tab from the top menu. Here is where you can add a lot of details, including your author bio, photos, and book trailer videos.
One immediate benefit is that you can add your blog feed. Anyone who follows you on Amazon will be able to read your latest blog posts on your author page.
Make a note of your Author page URL and use it in your book promotion activities.
Use Author Central to make your Amazon book sales page stand out
The next step is to the “Books” tab.
You should see a list of all your Amazon books in all versions; Kindle books, paperbacks, and audiobooks.
If you don’t see a book listed, click the “Add A Book” button to claim your book.
If your book is only very recently published, you might get a message saying, “please try later.” But if you can find your book, it should appear on your list in about 24 hours.
Once all your titles and versions are on your book list, it is time to get to work.
For each of your book versions or formats and editions, as Amazon calls them, there are detail pages where you can modify your book description, add reviews, and place additional information on your sales page.
Add your editorial book reviews
Yes, you can add book reviews to your Amazon sales page by using Author Central, and be sure that your book reviews will not be deleted.
Click on the tab “Edit Book Details” tab, and you will come to a page as in the image below.
Click on the edit button next to Review. You can then add your editorial reviews for your book.
The reviews you include will now show on your book sales page on Amazon.
So much more you can do with Author Central
There is a lot of information that you can add to your book’s sales page. But why add all this information?
Because every word you add is increasing your Amazon search possibilities.
Every word, or if you are into SEO, every keyword you use will become searchable words and phrases used by buyers on Amazon.
Imagine if someone is looking to buy terracotta pots, and you have this phrase in one of your book data fields. There is a good chance your book page will show in the list of results.
So yes, Author Central is a very important book promotion tool for you.
Add more information about your book
For each section, there is an edit button. Click it to open each edit screen.
You will see a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) text editor.
When you add or paste your text, you can style it a little using bold, italic, or make a bullet list or numbered lists.
If you have a little knowledge of HTML, you can add more tags to improve the look of your text.
Click on the “Edit HTML” tab, and you will see your text with its markup.
You can see all the codes that Amazon accepts by referring to its page on Supported HTML for book descriptions.
Check your improved book sales page
Once you have added and enriched all of your text fields, wait 24 hours. Then you will see your new formatted text on your sales page.
You will also see the editorial reviews you added, about the author, as well any other information you completed, such as the inside flap or back cover.
It is so easy for every book publisher to improve a book sales page. You can add so much valuable information for potential book buyers.
You will need to edit each version of your book. Yes, that’s a bit of a pain if you have a lot of titles. But it is well worth the effort.
The easiest way to do it is to complete one version, say your Kindle book. Then copy the HTML content of each text box into a text editor like TextEdit or Notepad.
But make sure you save your files. There is another use for your text coming later in this article.
Make the changes to your Kindle version. Then when you come to edit your paperback, simply paste in your coded text.
But there are more ways you can use Author Central.
Amazon Author Central is not very central, unfortunately. You need to do a little extra work for international markets.
You can have international author pages for Amazon UK, Germany, France, and Japan.
This is a fantastic way to extend your potential sales by reaching new readers. Yes, there are a lot of people who read in English outside the US and UK.
For instance, go to Amazon Author Central UK to create your UK author page and improve your UK book sales pages.
Another way is to go to your book on Amazon.co.uk and click your author name, just below the title.
That will tell you if you have an author page. If not, Amazon will ask you if you want to set one up.
Set up a new Author Central Author Page for each country. Remember the text you copied and saved before?
This is when it really comes in useful. Just paste your text into the appropriate sections of all your book details.
It made it much easier to create my author page in Japan.
Summary
You’ve written and published a great book.
But if you are not using your Author Central to help increase your book sales and sales rank, you should be.
Having an author page on both Amazon US and UK is a must. But the other countries can help you too.
It doesn’t take long to make your book sales pages far more appealing. The publishing industry and selling books is tough, so every little lever you can pull will help you.
There is one last bonus.
You will have access to much better sales info data, including NPD Bookscan, sales rank by title and version, and your overall Author ranking.
What are you waiting for?
Use Amazon Author Central and all of its tools to help you reach more readers and sell more books.
One word of caution for UK authors. There are geoblocking issues with Amazon UK, so make sure you set up an Amazon US page.
Ooh, a few new extra things to check – thanks Derek!
Thanks for you invaluable advice! I managed with a lot of frustration (more to do with my lack of skills than your instructions) to set up my author’s page. I guess like every Author, I am passionate about sharing my story of misdiagnosis with a twist…deal with illness from a physical, emotional and spiritual perspective. Thank you so much!