How to create and improve your Author Central Page

If you are a published author, your books are probably sold on Amazon and you should take advantage of a free promotion tool that Amazon provides—Author Central.

What is Author Central?

Amazon creates a web page for every author. If you sell books via Amazon, you already have an author page. If you have ever wondered why some author names on Amazon are clickable and others are not, this is why: the clickable names belong to authors who have claimed their Author Central page.

In this anthology, for example, Erzabet Bishop and JL Merrow have claimed their Author Central pages—well done, girls!—while Lois Cloarec Hart and Fletcher DeLancey haven’t gotten around to it yet.

That’s why Lois’ author page looks like this:

While Erzabet’s looks like this:

As you can see, Erzabet’s Author Central site lists all of her books, Erzabet’s bio and a photo, and also her Twitter and blog feeds.

So how do you set up your Author Central Author Page?

The first thing you need to do is to go to Author Central and click “Join Now.” If you already have an Amazon account, you can use that login. Then you enter your name (or if you write under a pseudonym, enter your pen name). A list of book appears. Select one of yours.

It might take a few days for Amazon to verify your identity. They’ll send you an e-mail that you’ll have to confirm. While you’re waiting, you can start filling in your author profile.

How do you set up your author profile?

Once you have logged in to your Author Central account, click on “Profile” in the blue menu bar at top of the page.

Here, you add:

• Your author’s bio: click on “edit biography” and copy in your bio, which has to be at least 100 characters long.
• A photo of yourself.
• Your blog feed: If you use WordPress, your feed adress is http://xxx.wordpress.com/feed/ and if you use Blogger, it’s http://xxx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/ default (Replace the “xxx” with the name of your blog). Your Author Central Page will then show your latest blog posts.
• Events: List events such as readings, book signings, etc.
• Videos: You can upload a book trailer or a video interview.
• Your Twitter feed
• Your author page URL: You can create a custom URL by clicking “add link.” My author page URL, for example is amazon.com/author/jae. You might want to add your Author Central page URL to your e-mail signature.

Once you completed your author profile, make sure your Author Central Page lists all your books.

How do you add books that aren’t listed?

In the blue menu bar, click on “Books.” The page that appears lists all books that will show up on your author page.

If any of your books are missing, click on “Add more books.”

How do you add information to a book?

For example, if you get a great review posted on a reviewer’s blog, log in to your Author Central account, go to “Books,” and click on the title of the book. In the “editorial reviews” tab, you can add one or two sentences of an outside review. Don’t forget to name the source.

That’s it—you successfully created your Author Central Page! Congratulations.

How do you set up your Author Page on Amazon.uk, Amazon.de, and Amazon.fr?

By the way, Author Central doesn’t just exist for the US. There’s also one in the UK, Germany, and France, but you need to fill out the author information for each Author Central Page separately. You might want to take the time to do that if your book is also available in these countries.

Here are the links:

https://authorcentral.amazon.com

https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk

https://authorcentral.amazon.fr

https://authorcentral.amazon.de

Log in to the British/German/French Author Central, using your Amazon.com account info. The layout of those Author Central sites is the same as the US-American one. You could have the US Author Central open at the same time, use that as a guide, and copy/paste the information from there.

So what can readers get out of Author Central?

Last, but certainly not least, Author Central is a very useful tool for readers too. If you go to an author’s page on Amazon, you can click on the link beneath “Stay Up To Date,” and Amazon will e-mail you every time the author releases a new book. That way, you never miss a new release of your favorite authors again.