- If you're self-publishing on Amazon,
then you should be leveraging Amazon Author Central.
But what is Amazon Author Central?
Well in their words,
Amazon Author Central lets you create your author page,
where you can share the most up-to-date information
about yourself and your books with millions of readers.
Helps readers find your books easily
and in one place.
That's all really looking good
but where is Amazon Author Central available?
That's available in the US, the UK, Germany,
France, India, Japan, Spain, Italy, and Brazil.
Now I could speculate,
I'm just merely speculating on this,
that it's going to be available in all regions eventually.
And keep in mind some of the features that are available
in some areas aren't available in other areas.
So there's just regional accessibility
for some of these things,
and I'll mention that as we go through
this comprehensive overview.
What's in it for you?
Well, here's the deal,
it's a one-stop shop that you can send
all of your readers to.
It's also great for self publisher resources
and information about your author brand.
And also there's a really nice feature,
when you do have an author profile on Amazon,
there's a follow feature.
So if somebody visits your page,
they click that follow,
when you release another title,
they'll be notified by email
and then they're gonna be more apt to go ahead
and buy another one of your books.
Stick around to the very end
because I'm gonna show you the various features
and how to set up an access each one of them
inside Author Central.
It's gonna blow your mind
of all the things they have available to you for free.
First thing, you're gonna go and visit,
author.amazon.com to set up an account.
You're gonna use your KDP login
or any Amazon associated log in.
You can also access this through your KDP dashboard
if you go over to the marketing tab
and you're just gonna select Author Central from there
and it'll drop you into the account.
Okay, so here's the eight features
in Amazon Author Central.
We are gonna take it one at a time
and I've saved the best for last.
Number one, add your books to an author page.
Select the books tab at the top of Author Central,
click add it now, in the paragraph at the top.
Now type the title ISBN ASIN or author name,
I prefer using the ASIN, it seems to pull it up every time.
And as soon as you see your title there,
you're just gonna select it
and essentially add it to your thing.
And as soon as you confirm that you're the author,
it should drop it right into your account,
and within a few business days,
it'll appear inside your author profile.
Number to add your bio.
Now this is available in different languages
in different regions, so this is pretty cool.
Click profile at the top of the dashboard,
select the region appropriate language,
click edit, then type in your bio.
Once you're set, click preview bio,
then published bio once you're satisfied.
Number three, add photos and videos.
Click profile on the top of the dashboard.
To edit your author photo,
click the pencil icon just below the author profile,
then upload your photo.
Now keep in mind, it will need to be at least
300 pixels by 300 pixels
in a JPEG PNG or GIF.
And I'm not really sure how it would work
because I don't know that it actually stays active
on your profile.
In the profile section,
you can also upload additional pictures or videos.
You can select upload media,
then click upload photo.
It has the same requirements as the profile picture,
or click upload video.
The video must be under 500 megabytes.
So you can't have some gigantic video file
or Epic movie that you're going to upload there.
The file format needs to be AVI, FLV, MOV,
MPG, WMV or MP4.
Number four, check your Amazon bestseller rank.
Now this is available for five of the 13 regions
that you're able to publish
through Kindle Direct Publishing.
You're gonna select view sales rank in the dashboard.
You can select from the five of the 13 regions,
which includes US, UK, Germany, France and Japan.
Next select your author name into the next dropdown
and you can select the specific book you want
in the last drop down.
Keep in mind, you can also choose the format and additions,
and also view the historical sales rank.
Then you can narrow it down to two weeks, one month,
six months, one year, two years and all available.
Much like the previous step
you can view the ABSR
for various formats and additions.
Number five, check customer reviews.
Select view customer reviews in the dashboard.
You can sort by region and filter.
Only nine of the 13 regions are available,
but this is going to be more than sufficient.
And select specific book you want in the second filter.
When you want to see the review on Amazon,
simply click the link at the bottom of each review.
There used to be a comment feature on Amazon
for each one of the reviews
but they've since removed that,
but when you go visit it over and on Amazon,
there's a little helpful button,
so if you particularly like a specific review,
you can always hit that helpful button.
Number six, add editorial reviews.
Now just a heads up, this is only available in the US.
I imagine again they're gonna probably
roll this out to other regions, but here we are.
This actually appears in the section
just below your book description
and right above the product details.
All right, we're going to go back over into your dashboard
and select the books tab.
You must have the marketplace set at Amazon.com
because this is US only.
Select the title you want,
add the editorial review section too.
Pick either the Kindle or paperback version,
sadly it's not available for audio books.
Then hit edit book details.
The rest is fairly intuitive, but it gets a little tricky.
In fact, I'm going to do an entire video
on how to use this entire area
without pulling your hair out.
You can see I didn't get that far,
(crickets chirping)
because yeah well.
(dramatic music)
Number seven, share blog feeds.
Again this is US only.
So do you have a blog?
Well, you can now actually attach the feed
to your author profile.
So anytime that you do a blog post on your website,
it'll actually appear in a quick link
over on your author profile,
so then people see what you're doing on a regular basis.
Go back to the edit profile feature,
select add blog,
then click add feed.
If you're new to blog feeds,
you can get more info when you visit learn more
and than that link is at the top of the page there.
Number eight, check BookScan sales info, again US only.
Essentially this is how BookScan works,
it tracks point of sales for your books
in specific regions.
Now for this one it's just us only,
so anytime someone scans your book,
or it's checked out say at like a bookstore
or bought somewhere,
then it will go through BookScan.
Now here's the beauty of it is this tracks it via regions.
So for the US it'll show, it will breakdown
to various cities and show you where it's most popular.
This might help you out
when you're doing marketing and promotions.
So if you're running Facebook ads
or you're doing any kind of author appearances,
you could always use this data to know,
okay, I'm popular in Los Angeles,
or I'm popular in New York.
Go to the reports and marketing tab
at the top of the dashboard.
It's like view report in the BookScan box.
Now you can see your author brand
and how it does overall in the US.
You could select the book,
but as you kind of see it's rather clunky
with no search feature.
And if you've got a big backlog of books,
good luck trying to find the specific book that you want.
And you can even narrow it down
by four weeks, eight weeks, 52 weeks, and all available.
And now you select sale by geography.
And you can actually see all the different regions
that it's available through,
it's fairly intuitive.
Then you can see, Oh, okay,
I've got a big following out in New York or up in Detroit,
things like that, it'll help you out in the longterm.
Hey, I actually got an entire video,
this is gonna seem really confusing,
but hear me out,
why you should not be publishing on Amazon KDP.
Actually I talk about it right here,
you might wanna watch that one.
And if you're you already seen that,
YouTube says you should go check out this one.
I'll see in either one.