Amazon's Author Central with Kendra E. Ardnek

Hello! I'm here myself today to talk about Amazon's Author Central, a handy tool that Amazon has. A tool that, if you have a book ON Amazon, you'll want to have an account.

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And, yes, I'm skimping on introductions today. My sister FINALLY came home yesterday, and we stayed up 'til one talking, and THEN I finally got started on today's posts. #NoRegrets. I've missed my sister, and she's missed me. But onto the post!

First of all, what is Amazon's Author Central? How is it different than just, say, your KDP account?

Well, KDP is your publishing platform, Author Central is how you're going to look like a professional author. Author Central is how you're going to get your Author Page, and gain finer control over the presentation of your books. No matter what publication route you took, if you have a book listed on Amazon, Author Central is available to you.

Now let's get into how to use it.

I'm not going to walk you through getting an account - it's been six years since I did that, and, as I remember, it was fairly intuitive.

Get yourself an account, and you'll come to the dashboard above. And, BOOM, you'll have an author page. You can find a link to your page on this dashboard, and you can edit this page with the dashboard.

Add a biography, author photo(s), video(s), and even link up your blog so that it will post to your Amazon page. 

There's also an event option, but I've never used it.

How your author picture and bio will appear on your official page.

How videos will appear.

How your blog posts will appear. Videos and extra pictures will be next to them.

The next tab that you have is your books. This tab will allow you to customize your bookshelf and how your books appear on Amazon. To customize that bookshelf, just click the "Add Books" tab.

You'll pull up this tab, where you can search your author name and manually add all books that you wrote. BOOM! All your books will now be on your author's page, and they will link back to your author's page, and it'll be much easier for readers to read all of your books.

Although, I will like to note that sometimes it can take a few hours/up to a day before these show up on your author page.

To customize the listing of one of your books (as well as see details on it) Just click on the title. You'll bring up this page where you can add editorial reviews, edit the book's description without having to go through the KDP revision process, add a note from the author, and a few other options that I don't use. (On the "About the Author" You've already got that on your author page, and that will on your book's page. You don't have to worry about this one.)

(Oh, and by the way, don't forget that Sew, it's a Quest is currently FREE on kindle)

One point of note, though, is that you have to change the information individually for each listing of your book. See how my paperback info differs from my kindle?

The next tab is sales info. Now, I don't use the first option, which is for individual sales, since I get that info anyway through KDP and CreateSpace, and those two sites are far more accurate. But the "Books by Geography" is a pretty cool feature. I can only see paperback sales, though.

The next page is a quick way to keep an eye on your book's sales ranking. I think the 'at a glance' here is by week.

And your author ranking as a whole.

Final tab is reviews. Any review that anyone writes for your books will appear here. There is a bit of delay, so if you're the person who sits on your bookshelf watching for reviews (which I *coughcough* DON'T do), you'll probably see a review before it appears here. Still, it's nice to have them together.

Now, we may be out of tabs, but there's one more reason that you need Author Central, and that's linking your paperback books to their kindle counterparts. Now this'll probably happen naturally eventually, you'll just have to wait a few weeks, but doing this will reduce that down to a couple days at the most.

There's a "help" button at the right hand top of the screen, not matter which tab you're on. Click that. Boom, you're on the help page. Now click this lovely "Contact us" tab."

I have enlarged this tab so that you can see the choices that I selected. Then tell them to email you, and give them the ASIN to your kindle book and the ISBN to your paperback. You don't need to write anything else, just give them those two numbers, and hit send.

There are other helpful things on that help page, and I do recommend exploring it, but this is the #1 reason that I go over there.