Build an Author Brand, Develop Your Amazon Profile and Participate on Kindle Boards IN A DAY

By Darin Jewell and Conrad Jones

Growing your brand in order to reach a range of audiences and convert readers into fans is important to both a book’s and an author’s success. The Amazon Author Page provides a useful place for this, and will help readers discover your book. Similarly, Kindle Boards is an invaluable discussion forum and information centre for authors publishing ebooks for Kindle, Nook and more. In this ebook, we explain how you can use Author Central to personalize, modify and update the contents of your Author Page, and we provide useful tips on what to say, how to handle yourself on the forums and how to drive readers from your postings on Kindle Boards right into the pages of your book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Union Bridge Books
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780857280688

Book preview

Set up Your Author Profile on Amazon’s Author Central

The Author Central page on Amazon.co.uk provides a useful place for readers to learn about you. Helping readers get to know you is an effective way to introduce them to, or better educate them about, your books. On the author page, essential information is displayed about authors including their bibliography, biography, videos and author photos. You can use Author Central to personalise the contents of the author page dedicated to your books and connect it to your Twitter account.

Here’s how to start:

Set up your Author Central account if you have not already done so. If you are uncertain how to do this, then go to any Zadie Smith book and scroll down until you see the Amazon’s Zadie Smith page link. It will allow you to go her author profile page. Once you are on this page, scroll down the right hand side of the page. There you will see the Are you an author link. Click on the link and it will take you to the set-up page where you can begin to build your own author page. Make sure you have all your information to hand (see below). Amazon starts the creation process for your author page as soon as you sign up for Author Central but it can take three to five days for the author page to appear on the Amazon.co.uk site. You can begin adding content to an author page as soon as you sign up. Once your Author Central account is set up and approved by a publisher (if you have one; if not, you are the publisher), you can add more content and changes will appear on the author page within twenty-four hours of the time you add them in Author Central. In terms of adding information to your author page:

Once you are in Author Central, click the Profile tab and you’ll see sections for adding or changing your biography, photos, videos, etc. as well as a section to diarise dates for speaking or other events.

Click on the Add or Edit link next to the section, which you want to work on and the instructions will appear, along with space to add information.

If you do not have all the information to hand, do not worry. You can go back and edit the page at any time. Any section that is left blank will not appear on the author page. Sections are always available in Author Central so you can add or change the information later when you have prepared it properly. It is better to leave a section blank than waffle or post an unprofessional biography (see biography section below).

Managing your biography

How to create an author bio in a day

When writers set up a profile page, one part of the set up, which often seems to present problems, is the field asking for an author bio. This section is designed to tell the reader who the writer is, what kind of publications they have had in the past and sometimes, what credentials they have relating to the material they are publishing. It works exactly like the biographical paragraph in a cover letter, which