A Brief Overview of the Amazon Author Area

The Amazon Author Central Tool

Amazon’s Author Central is one of the best tools you have as a self-published author. One of the reasons for that is how high it automatically ranks in the search engine results. If you type in your author name and you have an Amazon author page, it may even outrank your own website, especially if it is new. However, this is great news, especially if you publish with Amazon, because all of your books are listed right there on your author central page. Let’s look at the five sections of Amazon’s Author Central.

Author Central Main Page

The main page of author central is where you will find information on what you can use this section for, as well as some instructions on how to change things. But the majority of the information on this main page is the latest news coming from Amazon regarding Amazon Kindle and the authors the publish books with Amazon.

Author Page

The second part is the author page. This is where you will edit your bio and write down the information that people will see when they scroll down the page of your book listing or click on your author name to go to your author page on Amazon. It is also where you can add blog posts to your Amazon blogs, and where you can add an upcoming event such as a book signing.

Books

There is also a section for you to add all of the books that you have published. Amazon does not automatically had books to your author page, because there are pages that have duplicate names. For example, there is an author that publishes – probably purposely – under the name Stephen King, but it is not the real Stephen King, and most of the reviews on his or her poorly written books are negative. Amazon will investigate briefly to make sure that these books really were published by your account before they add them to your author list.

Sales Information

Another thing you will find at Author Central is information on your sales. You’ll be able to see your Nielson BookScan numbers as well as what your current Amazon bestseller rank as an author is what your current bestseller rank is for each of the books that you have listed there. Some of this information is available to the public, listed on your individual book listing page, but not all. This is useful information for any author that is trying to improve their rankings.

Customer Reviews

Finally, you get to see customer reviews of your books all in one place. You’ll be able to see which books they refer to, with the star rating was and what people actually said. This can be really useful if you get a lot of reviews, because you look at all the new reviews without having to go to each individual book page and find out what was most recently posted. It is a very convenient way to keep track of what people are saying about your books.