This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared as a guest post on the BookBuzzr Blog on 10/21/11.
Amazon has been instrumental in the rise of the indie author. Amazon provides do it yourself publishing platforms both for ebooks (Kindle Digital Publishing platform) and print (Createspace), as well as its own imprint for a print and ebook publishing model. But that’s just the beginning. Amazon takes things a step further by treating indie authors the same as mainstream-published authors when it comes to marketing and promotional opportunities on the site. One example of this is Amazon Author Central, through which anyone who has authored content offered for sale on Amazon can have his or her own, dedicated Amazon Author page.
An Amazon Author page can be a surprisingly robust plank in your author platform, especially considering that they’re offered totally free of charge. Your Amazon Author page can include all of the following:
• Author Photo
• Author Brief Biography
• Author Bibliography (of books/content for sale on Amazon)
• Author Blog Posts
• Dedicated Discussion Board
• Integration With Facebook, Twitter, and Email
Here’s my Amazon Author page:
Setting up your Amazon Author page is very, very easy, and it’s an opportunity that’s open to all authors, mainstream-published and indie alike.
First, you need to have an Amazon account. It doesn’t matter whether you have one set up as a consumer or self-publisher, either type of account is fine to use for Author Central sign-up. Just go to the Amazon Author Central page, login, and fill in the provided form to have an Amazon Author Page created for you. On the U.S. site its URL is http://authorcentral.amazon.com, and on the U.K. site the URL is http://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk . This page shows the options and tabs available to you once you’re logged in:
Read the rest of the post on the BookBuzzr Blog.