Did you know that Amazon has a free marketing tool to help you sell more
books to customers on the Amazon platform?
And recently they updated it so that now it will showcase more of
your books to potential customers.
You now have a say in what book recommendations Amazon can make
to potential customers.
And now there's also some useful behind the scenes features that just gives you
some extra data about your books and about the book sales.
So this is what we're going to look at in today's video. Now,
if you're not been to this channel before then welcome.
My name's Paul Marles and I do videos on how to make it keep it and grow it and
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So what is this marketing tool? Well,
it's the author page which you can create with a free Amazon
Author Central account.
So in this video we're gonna look at what it is and the new updates.
I'll show you how to set up your page properly and we'll look at those new
behind the scenes features as well. So first of all,
what is an Amazon author page? Well,
if you go across to any Amazon listing of books,
you'll see that the author names or publisher names are highlighted in blue.
And if you click on one of these, it takes you to an author page,
which now looks like this, where you've got about the author section,
your most popular book, and then a listing of all your books.
Now this only applies at the moment to amazon.com,
so that's the US site.
On the older sites and what the author page used to look like was this. Now you
may say, well, actually this looks a bit better,
but I'll show you some of the disadvantages of it. First of all, this has gone,
this was a section where publishers could upload videos,
blog posts about their books.
And it had this feature here where you could scroll through all the books,
which actually looks quite nice and you can quickly scroll through the books.
But there was one feature of this that I didn't like and that was if you were to
scroll through this list and you saw a book that you liked,
if you just clicked out on that book,
instead of clicking on open link in new tab, it would open the book page.
But then what happened is when you went back to the author page,
it took you straight back to the beginning of the book listings.
So I used to find it actually a bit of a pain and I would often give up
on that. It did have book listings as we can see here, but not many.
The new version showcases so many more books at once.
Now, as I said,
the older version is still on the Amazon sites in different countries,
but I'm sure that's all going to be changed in the near future and they'll all
be updated to this new version.
So the benefits of having one of these pages is that it gives increased
visibility to your books.
You can show more of your books to potential customers,
and the author page is actually a feature that me personally I use all the
time. Whenever I look at a book that I'm thinking about buying,
I always click on the author link and see what other books they've got for sale
because maybe they have something that's more appropriate to what I'm looking
for. And quite often I'll buy, at once,
two or three books from the same author if they look interesting.
Which is probably why on my Kindle I've got over a thousand books,
many of which I've not yet read, but hopefully one day,
sat on a beach sipping margaritas, I'll be able to get through them.
Now,
one of the other benefits is that this gives you a
brand because you can upload a logo as I show you in a moment and also a
biography and the way it's all set out,
it just gives you more of a professional appearance,
more of a better brand. And again, that creates trust.
Customers will tend to buy more books from sellers that do have
that sort of brand appearance. I know sellers that don't have an author page.
If you click on their author name,
it just takes you to a normal Amazon listing and that author's
books can be dotted around in that listing in no particular order.
And intermixed with that are books from other publishers as well.
So it doesn't look particularly good and is a bit of a pain becasue you've gotta
search through all the Amazon listings in an ortho page. They're all there for
a customer to see.
The other benefits of having an author page is that you do get some useful
analytics, which we'll look at in a moment,
give you a better insight into your book sales and also as I'll show you
why in a moment, it will save you a bit of time as well.
So let's look at setting up one of these pages on Amazon.
So first of all you'd go to author.amazon.com and you'll see a page like
this.
And all you need to do is just click on join for free and it will take you to a
sign inpage. And it says here, if you're a KDP author,
then sign in with your KDP account.
It will then take you a page like this.
Now what you need to do is to either search for a title of one of your books,
search your author name or search using an ISBN of one of
your books or one of your ASINs as well. So here,
I'm just gonna put in my name.
Now I don't have any books published under my name.
You will see some books published on Amazon under my name.
They are not my books. So this is what you'll be presented with.
It'll be a list of books and what you do is choose those books that are
yours.
Then Amazon will send you a confirmation email
and overall it can take up to seven days
for them to approve your account and for it to all be set up.
When it is set up, you'll be presented with a page.
Like this.
Now I do have to scrub out images of my books and my
brand.
The reason being is that due to exposure on this channel,
people just go and copy my books identically. Anyway,
this is a page you are presented with. So what you want to do, when setting up,
is to click on profile, which will take you to this page.
And this is where you upload a logo of your brand and
also down here your short biography.
So just think of something interesting to say about your publishing
business, why you're publishing books, the type of books that you create.
Now you can go ahead here and see what your author page looks like on the
different sites. Again, as I mentioned,
on those other sites it will look like the older version.
You can create a link to your author page,
which is very useful for marketing purposes. You could put that link in books
that you publish.
But also I think what's a better use is to use it on social
media sites. So you could use this on things like Pinterest, Instagram,
Facebook, and sites like that.
So people can click on it and go direct to your author page. It says here,
managed blog feeds, photos, and videos. Those have now been done away with.
So the next tab is this one here where it says books.
And here it will list all the books that you've added to
your account.
Now books won't automatically appear here unless you add each one
individually to your account. So to add each book,
you just click here on add it now.
So it is a little bit of a pain if you've got a lot of books and it can take
some time. Once you've done all that,
that's your actual author page that customers see that's
all set up. So there's nothing more to do on that front.
So let's have a look at these other new useful features.
So what you need to do is click on reports and marketing.
And this is where I think it gets quite interesting.
Here you've got this section called book recommendations.
And if you click on create recommendation,
it will take you to this page where you can make selections of your book.
So my most talked about book is my book I wish more readers knew about.
If you're new to my work, I recommend starting with this book and so on.
Now it says here that once submitted,
the book recommendations will be shown on your Amazon author page
and Amazon website.
And also it says that when Amazon emails customers or
potential customers,
they may send those recommendations to customers as well.
So it's just an extra way of potentially picking up new customers
and also highlighting new books to old customers.
And you can see here there's this section where it says Amazon followers.
In fact, I didn't know about this.
So this may be new to the Amazon Author Central,
but I've got 400 followers now I think in the lifetime of all my books,
I've sold about 85,000 books.
So the conversion rate of customers to followers is going to be very
small, but again,
it's just a few extra sales that potentially could be made
if Amazon is recommending your books to these
followers. And if we scroll down, we've got these sections here.
One is sales rank.
Now this is quite useful because if you wanted to know what the sales ranks of
your books were, instead of going to the amazon.com page,
clicking on each book looking at what the sales rank is,
it will tell you this if you just click on view report.
And here you will see a listing usually in order of your
books with the best sellers rank here on the left hand side. So this is very
useful just to get an idea of where your books are in terms of bestsellers
rank. The next section is the Boookscan Weekly sales report,
which looks like this.
Now this is not the total sales of all your books,
this is just a total sales of your bestselling books.
And here on the right hand side you've got your bestselling book,
your second most bestselling book,
you can click on these little boxes and compare sales over a
period of time of your bestselling books and, you know, all your other books.
Just a a little bit of extra useful information. And lastly,
we've got customer reviews,
and this lists the customer reviews in order as they come in for all
your different books. Again, it's just a bit of useful information.
It's better than going to each book,
clicking on reviews and having a look at those reviews. You can just quickly
scroll through and get an idea of what customers are saying about your
particular books.
So when it comes to marketing your books,
this is just one useful aspect of that because you've got
all other aspects like building a website, using social media like Instagram,
Pinterest, Facebook. But this is free.
It's on Amazon and it's probably going to get a lot more eyeballs than your
other social media accounts unless you build those up quite well and build
traffic to them.
So it's just a useful way of building a brand and hopefully getting more
book sales. Now,
if you are new to this whole book publishing process on Amazon and you want to
know how to maybe get started on publishing,
say a basic notebook and uploading it to Amazon and hitting that publish button,
then what I suggest doing is watching this playlist where I go through all the
different steps involved in this business of creating and publishing on Amazon.
Thank you much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.