Today I’m going to share a real-world example of one of the benefits of Amazon Author Central. I experienced this personally because of my involvement with Fandemonium, the Facebook Anthology social publishing experience that Outskirts Press and its Facebook Community members joined together in producing over the past two months.
Author Central allowed me to “improve” the appearance of Fandemonium’s listing on Amazon. Here’s how:
When Fandemonium was originally distributed via Ingram, the “meta data” information for the book’s synopsis information looked like this on Amazon:
It’s all one big block of text, and not very visually inviting. I’ll admit this was my fault, since I uploaded the meta data personally for this book instead of having one of our professional project managers do it for me, in which case, it would have looked correct initially. They publish over 100 books a month so they’re used to the tricky nuances of formatting meta data so it looks great on Amazon. Another example of “leaving it to the experts.”
But, never fear. Amazon Author Central let me easily improve the formatting myself. I simply logged into my Author Central account and edited my book’s record. The changes took a couple of days to update, and then, just like that, the new listing looked like this:
This is just one reason to have an Amazon Author Central account. I’ve discussed other reasons in the past and will continue on that topic in the near future.
In the meantime, congratulations to all our Facebook Community members who have work appearing in Fandemonium. With every copy sold, Outskirts Press is donating $7.38 to the American Red Cross on behalf of its Facebook fans, so buy your copy today by clicking here. Currently, American Red Cross efforts are assisting in the aftermath of the Japan earthquake and Pacific tsunami, so in addition to taking part in a social publishing experience, it’s for a good cause.
President of Outskirts Press 