Tag: amazon author central

Amazon

How to add a Twitter Feed to your Amazon Author Central Account

If you’re a published author with a book on Amazon, you need to have an Author Central Account. This is pivotal advice I share in my book Sell  Your Book on Amazon.  And if you’re a business person, manager, entrepreneur or CEO and you don’t have a published book on Amazon, what are you waiting for?

Amazon’s Author Central functionality gives you some tools to establish your presence on Amazon. They recently added the ability to pick up your Twitter feed. Here’s how:

1. Sign-in to your Author Central account (or create one) at http://amazon.com/authors

2. Once you are signed-in click on your Profile button.

3. Along the right-hand side under “Photos” and “Videos” is a section headlined “Twitter.” Click the “Add account” link and provide your twitter username. It will start picking up the RSS feed immediately.

Amazon, branding, self publishing

How to add a video to your Amazon Author Central account

 If you’re a published author with a book on Amazon, you need to have an Author Central Account.  And if you don’t yet have a published book on Amazon, it’s time to get published.

Here’s how to add a video to your Author Central account:

1. Sign-in or register at http://amazon.com/authors

2. Once your are signed-in click on your Profile button.

3. Along the right-hand side under “Photos” is a section headlined “Video.” Click the “Add Video” link and browse the contents of your hard drive to upload a video. It must be under 10 minutes in length and under 500 MB.

In fact, that’s a good rule of thumb for any internet video.  In fact, 10 minutes is a bit too long.

If you don’t have a video to upload, you may be interested in our Book Video and Distribution option, which you can order by clicking here. It’s available to writers and professionals regardless of where you published your book (although you’ll get a substantial discount if you’ve published the book with Outskirts Press).

self publishing, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Amazon Author Central Benefits

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.