Are you an author trying to sell a book on Amazon?
Are you trying to find ways to increase the sales of your book(s)?
What marketing strategies are you doing to increase those sales?
One very important piece of the puzzle is setting up an Amazon Author Central account. As an author, you should take full responsibility of your profile information as well as helping to promote your books. If you leave it up to your publisher, chances are it won’t be done as well as it could be or should be or in a timely manner.
The benefits of an Amazon Author Account
So what are the benefits of an Amazon Author Central account? There are two main reasons, among a host of others.
- Write a better description for your books that can be updated constantly.
- Get more relevant information in front of the buyer’s eyes when they are thinking of purchasing your book.
Ever go to a book’s page and see a book description that has a lot more interesting information than your plain description?
Ever notice that some descriptions have catchy reviews or words that stand out? Those things grab your eye, don’t they?
So how is that done? You got it – within your Amazon Author account.
Typically, your publisher will write a simple description of your book when submitting the book to Amazon and that’s that. But it doesn’t have to be, nor should it.
Within your author account, you can override that description with something a lot more compelling. Plus, if you have some great reviews that come in, why wouldn’t you tell the world about it!? You’re there to sell your book and what better way than to get a great review and show it off.
The other point is that you can provide a lot of potentially relevant information to your profile. Amazon makes it easy to include things like:
- Adding your biography
- Adding a feed from your blog
- Add links to your website
- Linking your Twitter account
- Adding photos and videos
- Adding Events like speaking engagements, appearances, etc.
For some buyers, it’s important to know who the author is and what he/she has done. One of our authors is Daniel Barth. He has written science fiction books for kids that are steeped in real science. He is an award winner and his books have been used in schools. These are great selling points. See what his Maurice on the Moon book page looks like.
Once you have created all this information and all your books are tied to this account, if you make any chances, it filters to all your books. You don’t have to do it for each book (except those items that pertain to each book specifically).
And again, you will want to do this yourself. Unless your publisher is good, they may not really care to change your information with any kind of timeliness, if at all.
Other benefits of Amazon Author Central for the author
- Sales information for all your books. Unfortunately, it excludes kindle books although we’re not quite sure why.
- Repository of all the reviews that have come in for all your books.
- See what your rank is among other authors.
We are amazed at the number of authors out there that don’t utilize this free service, important service by Amazon. A lot of them don’t even know it exists.
Take charge of some of your marketing yourself especially when it’s so simple.