5 Tips to Make Your Amazon Author Central Page Work for You
Authors are not without influence when it comes to the way their book appears on Amazon. Through the use of an “Amazon Author Central” account, traditional and self-published authors can take charge of their book listings and create an eye-catching product pages for potential readers.
What is an Amazon Author Central page?
It’s a free landing page Amazon offers to all authors. It houses your bio, links to all your books, your blog, and allows readers to connect with you. If you’re spending time and money to drive traffic to your Amazon book listing page, you don’t want the relationship with your reader to end after they hit Buy Now.
You want to offer more. You want to create a way to stay connected with that reader. And an Amazon Author Central page allows it to happen.
Your Author Central page is a great way to attract new, lifelong readers. But if the page isn’t well-crafted, readers may be deterred from following you (or making the original purchase in the first place).
Things like typos and low-quality formatting can make them think that the same level of care wasn’t put into the book’s content. Poorly-written copy that doesn’t accurately describe the book can also be a red flag and may lead readers to believe the book is not what they expected. All of this could lead to them simply closing the page and not making the purchase.
Optimizing an Author Central page on Amazon involves more than just the book description. Below are all of the elements that should be taken into account:
1. Ensure that all formats are connected
Ensure that readers can quickly and conveniently transition between your various book formats and prices if you have published paperbacks, hardcovers, ebooks, and/or audiobooks.
In some cases, this will occur automatically, while in other situations you must manually link them to your author page.
2. Ensure linkage of other books
In order to ensure that readers can locate your other books quickly, ensure that all of them are connected to the same author page. If you published under separate accounts, getting in touch with Author Central is probably the best course of action. However, if all your books were published under the same Amazon login, then you can typically link them together by claiming them in the back end.
From here, ensure your book listing pages are optimized and professional.
No surprises here, a book’s description should be unambiguous, appealing, and pertinent. It should explain the subject of the book, why readers would be interested / how it applies to them, and why the author (that’s you) is the best person to have written it.
A book description should provoke the reader to find out additional information.
3. Headshot and Bio
The author page for your book should include a professional headshot and a short biography. If you have a shorter version that appears in your book, this can also be added here. As a suggestion, you may want to include your website at the end of the bio to make it easy for readers to learn more about you.
You can also upload additional images and/or videos. If you have a book trailer or any related videos that are connected to the subject of your book, including them will help make your page more distinctive.
Want readers to follow you on other platforms, too? Include those links in your bio.
4. Feature testimonials
There’s nothing quite like social proof. Make sure to highlight any positive reviews from your book in a dedicated section for endorsements.
You can also place blurbs here, if you have any. (Blurbs are the reviews from other well-known names. If you have these, they’re most likely on your book cover or within the first few pages of the book.)
5. Utilize expanded category availability
A lesser-known tip for authors is that Amazon KDP lets you pick only three categories for your book. Being a part of Author Central, however, gives you an added perk:
You can choose up to ten categories for your book to be a part of. And it’s not ten total categories — it’s ten for each format.
Obviously, the categories must be relevant to the book, but adding more of them makes it easier for readers to find your book.
Make your Amazon Author Central page work for you
Of course Amazon makes it even easier for us to reach readers, right? Because the more books we sell, the more books they sell — more money for us is more money for them.
And deservedly so, since they created the world’s largest bookstore.
Amazon has done its homework and continues to come up with ways to make it easier for us to sell our books. The Amazon Author Central page is one of the easiest ways to optimize our Amazon listings.
So take the leap of faith today and get that page up and running!