If you are an author with a book on Amazon (even if it is a co-authored book) you can set up an AuthorCentral page. These pages function as a mini-website about you and your work on Amazon. Anytime someone is looking at a book listing on Amazon, the author of the book is listed with a hyperlink. Click on that link and you will either get a list of all the books by that author or the link will take you to that author’s Author Central Page.
Here are a few things you can include on your author page:
- Bio – This can be more in depth than the bio on your book page and you can show more “personality” here. I think it is a nice touch to include a bit about your journey as an author – why you decided to write your books and your experiences around the book. Remember, this is a place to connect with your readers and your audience.
- Photos – up to 8 photos of the author and/or book in a variety of settings. This is a good place to include pictures of you speaking or working with clients. It is also nice to have some more casual photos that help the reader connect to you as a person (like photos of you with your dog, etc.) You do need to be sure you have the rights to the photo and it is not copyrighted.
- Video – We can post video that is no more than 10 minutes long and no larger than 500MB in size. The formats that are supported include avi, flv, mov, mpg, and wmv. We can’t link to video hosted elsewhere (like YouTube or Vimeo) – we have to upload the actual video file and it is hosted on Amazon. You can add several videos here if you want. Consider several “mini lessons” from your book.
- Twitter feed – This is a automatic draw from your Twitter posts. All you need to enter is your Twitter handle and it will be completely automated.
- Blog feed – This feature lets you set your blog posts to show up on your page. If you have more than one blog, you can add more than one feed. This is also an automatic pull from your blog RSS feed. You’ll need your feed address which you can get from your webmaster.. It will only pull new posts so if you want to re-post the last couple of blogs they will populate this section or you can just wait until your next blogs post.
- Events – This is a spot that you can list any book related events you have coming up. I will need a description of the event, the name and address of the venue and the event date and time. Unfortunately, there is no way to list virtual online events — it has to be a physical address. If you are planning an online event, just create a blog post about it and it will be listed in the blog section.
So be sure to take advantage of this feature for authors. It is a great way to connect with your readers and build a fan base..
