How to Maximize Your Amazon Author Page

Every author can have their very own author page on Amazon. It’s as easy as going to https://author.amazon.com and logging in. But making your page effective is more challenging. In this episode, Chris and Gena talk about how you can maximize your Amazon author page so it’s helpful, SEO-friendly, and propped to not only sell books, but also get people into your sales funnel.

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Episode 25 Transcription:

[00:00:13].770] - Gena
Welcome to the Writing Momentum Podcast. Welcome today, Chris. We're so glad you're here.

[00:00:19].580] - Chris
Good to be here.

[00:00:21].230] - Gena
We are talking today about something really we think is going to be really beneficial to authors, to writers. And that is what Chris?

[00:00:30].090] - Chris
It's the Amazon author page. So we're going to talk today about how to maximize your Amazon author page. And what many authors don't realize is that you have an Amazon author page whether you use it or not, and even whether you have a published book or not, you can have one. And this is the page that people go to when they click on your name on Amazon. So if there is a book out there and they click your name, that's the page they go to. If you go to a book and you click on an author's name and it just takes you to a generic listing of books, that means that author does not have an Amazon offer page set up. And they're super important to set up because it's free search engine optimization, it's free advertising. You really want to get your message out there.

[00:01:13].880] - Gena
Yeah, that's the thing that I wanted to bring up, is that this is free. This is something that is just available, that Amazon makes readily available for their people and for their authors. Whether you're traditionally published or independently published, it doesn't matter. You can get your information out there on Amazon and let's look at ways you can maximize it. Some of the different elements that we're going to talk about today that you can include on it.

[00:01:41].080] - Chris
Yeah. So now if you are listening to this podcast, we're going to go ahead and explain every step of what we're looking at. But if you actually want to go back and maximize your own Author page and you want to walk through with us, we're going to put a video version of this podcast with the screens that we're looking at on YouTube or on our website, writingmomentum.com. You can go there and check it out. So the regular Amazon Author page is a page, as we said, that you click on. It's got all your books on it. It's got your blog feed, it's got one click buy it now to different books that you have for sale. It also has your bio and a nice picture. But you need to set all that up because it's not just automatic. Right. So the page you go to to set that up is what .

[00:02:30].420] - Gena
We're going to go to author.amazon.com?

[00:02:33].030] - Chris
That's right. And then log in with your regular Amazon.com account credentials. Okay. So it's not anything fancy, it's just your Amazon account credentials. And when you get there, they've got this landing page that you can look at. But really you can ignore it because everything on this landing page is accessible through three menu items. And those three menu items are really what you want to make sure that you go through all three of those and fill out what's on those pages. The great thing is it's just three pages and it's not difficult to do. So the first page is called Profile. And on the profile page, this is where right at the top, you can click and upload a picture of yourself as an author. This is your author picture, the one that you had taken that you're so proud of. That's what you want to put there. And then right underneath that, it has space for you to put in a full biography. And this is actually a very large space. So you can put an extended biography in here. And I recommend doing that because you can put all kinds of great keywords in here, things that people might want to know about you.

[00:03:41].570] - Chris
This is also where I list my website, some of my social accounts, because there's nowhere else on the Amazon author page to put links to other things. But you can do it right here in your biography. Now, they're not linked. Amazon doesn't want people leaving Amazon, but you can put them in there and then people can find them.

[00:04:02].050] - Gena
Well, and here's the one thing Chris mentioned. Keywords. If you're not familiar with what keywords are, these are the words or the phrases that people use that they're searching for. So if you are writing in a specific genre, you want to get as specific as you can. So if you're writing paranormal, cozy mysteries for Tweens, or for middle graders, or for whatever you want to do, whatever your genre is, if you're a nonfiction author who writes for, self help books for people who are overcoming eating disorders, all of those are going to be keywords. And we call them long tail keywords, even the longer the phrase that someone would use to search for. So you want to make sure you've got your bio with enough keywords that represent what you're writing for.

[00:04:56].940] - Chris
Yeah. So in addition then to your picture in your bio, you can also upload additional photos and videos. So if you have a book trailer or something like that, you want to upload it, you can just click Upload Media on this page and upload those. And then you can also click on where it says Manage Blog Feeds. Now this to me is the most important button on this page because this allows you to connect your personal blog or multiple blogs to your Amazon profile. And so what happens is that every time your blog on your website is updated, it also updates updates right there on Amazon. So if you click that button, Manage Blog Feed, that's going to take you to a page where you can then click Add New Feed and you just put in the URL or the link of your blog feed. Now if you have a WordPress website, that's always going to be the nameofyourwebsite.com/feed, so our website writingmomentum.com, so the link writingmomentum.com/feed. And when you put that in there, that will make it so your blog post show up right on your Amazon Author page.

[00:06:11].680] - Chris
The other kind of cool things they have on this page is you can look and see what your Author page looks like at different Amazon properties around the world. For instance, Amazon in France or the UK or Japan, as well as you can get the exact link of your Amazon Author page URL. And so you can get all those on that page. But really the main things to focus on are your photo, your biography, and then adding your blog feed.

[00:06:37].640] - Gena
And I love the idea of the photos and videos, and I think this is really important. If you are a speaker and you have some videos of you speaking about maybe the topic that your book is about, you could go ahead and include that there too. The idea with the Amazon Author page is so that people, readers, potential readers, can get to know you. And this is really where you can build a dedicated reader base. So that's really what the point of this is. And as we said, it's free, so make the most of it.

[00:07:09].970] - Chris
For sure. Okay. Now that's actually the most difficult tab to set up, right? It won't take you more than about probably ten minutes to do, but after you do that, you want to go to the next tab, which is Books. Now this book tab is where you're going to identify which books on Amazon are yours. Amazon does not automatically put your books on your Amazon Author page, except I think maybe it might do it if you self publish a book through KDP, but otherwise it won't do it. And sometimes even then it won't. So what you have to do is you have to come in here and there's some words that say Add it now. You're going to click Add it now. And you're going to search for your own books. And when you find them, you'll claim them. And each book you claim then will show up on your Amazon Author page. And so that might take a few minutes, depending on how many books you have or how many additions there are and all that sort of thing. But you want to be sure to add each one of your books and then once you do, they're on your page and that's it for the bookstore.

[00:08:07].940] - Gena
Let me ask you this, Chris, because I think I'm answering the question by looking at this, but what if it's a book that you have contributed to, but that you are not the primary author?

[00:08:16].750] - Chris
That's okay as long as you've contributed to it and your name is listed as a contributor in that book, you can claim it on this page. Now, I don't think you can claim any book that your name actually does not appear on, at least as a contributor onto this page. So you want to be sure. If you do contribute to a book, a book can have, I believe it's up to ten contributors listed on it. So as long as there are less than ten people contributing to that book, contact the person who put the book together that you contributed to and say, hey, I want my book listed as a contributor on that book. And they can easily add you. It can be done through the Books page. There's a link on each Books page where you can contribute more information and you can add yourself, or they can add you as a contributor on that book.

[00:09:02].170] - Gena
I think this is a nice part that they've added to this, because a few years ago, this is not the case. And I had a book that I had written. My name was not on the cover of the book. I had been hired to do it. But I went ahead and contacted Amazon. I also contacted the publisher and said, Hey, this is my book, my work. And they went ahead and added it after the fact with that. But there were a lot more hoops to jump through at that time. This time there's not as many hoops to jump through.

[00:09:31].420] - Chris
Exactly. All right, so the third tab that you want to click on is the Reports and Marketing tab. Now, there's actually nothing to do on this page except for get information. So you're done submitting information on your Amazon Author page as far as this goes. But I always like to point out this page because it has some really great information on it. The first thing is it has a report for your sales rank. This shows where your titles rank on Amazon sales. Then it's got a weekly sales report, which is from Book Scan, and you can see which copies are sold of all your books reported by BookScan for any time period. So you can say, I want to see how many books I sold last month, or since the beginning of the year, and that sort of thing. And you can get that report in there. And then finally, you can also look at all the customer reviews of all of your books in one place. Here you can just click View Report on the Customer Reviews Report and see all those reviews in one place. So if you're ready to be either blessed or beat up, that's the report you want to click on, or you may just not want to click on it.

[00:10:41].590] - Chris
There is also a link on this page to the Amazon Ads account if you want to go ahead and learn more about ads and see about putting ads on Amazon or on Kindle.

[00:10:51].470] - Gena
Yeah, Chris is laughing about the whole customer reviews. That's probably something we can talk about in another podcast. But he's very right. Don't spend a lot of time going down that rabbit hole if it's only going to discourage you from writing. Because you know what? As someone said recently, if you're on the Internet, somebody's not going to like you.

[00:11:15].360] - Chris
That's right.

[00:11:15].720] - Gena
So it doesn't matter if we're talking about social media, a website, whatever, and especially writers, and there's a whole bunch of people out there that would be it'll, just make their day to give you a bad review or to give you an unfair review. Not always. There's a lot of nice people out there, but there are other people that they're just viewing the world differently. So be prepared for that. Move along. Don't open that tab if that's going to stifle or stop you from writing. Just go on with your day. You're doing great.

[00:11:50].000] - Chris
That's right. So this has been how to maximize your Amazon Author page. What you want to do is go to Author amazon.com, claim your page, fill out your information, claim your book, and get that page out there working. It's very easy to do it's free, by the way, so absolutely do it. And if you haven't looked at your page for a while, I encourage you to go back. You almost always will find something you can update. So until next time, we thank you so much for listening to the Writing Momentum Podcast. You guys make this the best. If you have any questions at all about writing, want us to talk about something? You'd love to hear your thoughts about it, please go ahead and send us an email. Go writingmomentum.com. We've got a little chatbot down there. You can send us your questions and we'll feature it on an upcoming podcast. And of course, please put your reviews on this podcast. That really helps when you're able to put a review on there and let other people know about our podcast because it helps them find us. And so if you had just a moment, we'd really appreciate that.

[00:12:44].490] - Chris
And until next time, we hope that you have Writing Momentum.