Who wouldn’t like his/her name in the author section of a book? Anyone would, right?
I published my first ever eBook back in 2014. It was an outcome of countless sleepless nights and a lot of self-motivation to publish my first book.
How did it go?
Well, not great. The sale was decent, but it took me a lot of time to sell my 500th copy.
Was the book bad?
Not at all! It is still one of the best books on Affiliate marketing in the industry and also one of my best works.
So what went wrong?
Well, promoting a book is not the same as blogging. It’s a different ball game and what I didn’t do is make a proper plan and strategy for promotion.
All of that resulted in a slow take-off.
However, I don’t want you to make similar mistakes, and that’s why I recommend you to have a detailed strategy and plan for promotion and marketing for your next book.
Now, this is a post that should be part of your book promotion strategy.
This is one of the lesser known features of the most popular online book selling store “Amazon” called Amazon Author Central.
What is Amazon Author central?
Is it a free service provided by Amazon to allow authors to reach out to more readers, promote books, and help build a better Amazon bookstore. If you’re an author with a book listed on Amazon, you are eligible to join Author Central. You can use your Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk customer account to get started (or create a new one if needed).
Here is how the author page looks like:
Here is how to get started.
- Head over to Amazon Author Central (U.S.A. here, UK here) and log in.
- If you can’t log in with your existing account details, you can create a new account here.
- The system will automatically search for authors matching the name on your customer account and will suggest books that could be yours. Below is a screenshot for your reference:
Amazon will send an email to your Amazon account to complete the account creation process. Once done, move on to the next steps.
- Customize your profile
- Add all your books to your profile
Start customizing your Amazon author central profile:
Go to Author profile customization page, and the very first thing you should do is to claim your Author page URL.
Here is what I have created: http://amazon.com/author/harsh.agrawal
Similarly, fill up all other sections like Biography, Blogs, Events, Photos, and videos.
It could take 45-60 minutes to complete the whole steps, and you should do it to make your author profile look complete. Try to fill up as many details as you can for visitors learn more about you and also help you get more book sales.
Add your existing books to your Amazon Author page:
If you have more than one book which wasn’t listed at the time of signup, read on.
Using this feature, you can link all your books to Amazon author profile.
Head over to Amazon author central books page and click on Add more books.
Now search for books you’ve written by title, author, or ISBN and add them to your bibliography.
Once you have added your books, t it may take up to 24 hours for the book to appear in your bibliography.
BookScan data:
This is another reason for every Amazon author to claim their profile and find more sales data about their books. These features are intended to show trends over time, and also where in the US your books are selling. I have not explored this feature a lot, but it is going to be highly useful for professional authors.
Over to you
If you have a published a book or an eBook, go ahead and claim your Amazon author profile. This is one feature that will help you get more visibility online. Author pages also rank well in Google search.
What other techniques do you follow to improve sales of your books on the Amazon store? Let me know in the comments below.
For now, here are a few hand-picked guides for book authors to read next.