updated Jan. 1, 2023
What is Amazon Author Central?
Amazon Author Central allows authors to create a dedicated page featuring your books, bio, and other information that will help readers find your work. If you have a book for sale on Amazon, whether traditionally or independently published, you need an Author Central page.
The Author Central page can also be a nice if bare-bones substitute for an author website. Personally, I think every author needs a dedicated website to keep everything in one place. However, if you don’t yet have an author website, your Amazon Author page is a good place for readers to find your profile and your books in a format that’s easy to navigate.
How to write your Amazon Author Central Bio
Keep it personable. Choose first person to sound more casual, third person to create a more professional bio that readers can excerpt when they’re posting reviews of your books.
Your bio should include the titles of your books, where you live, and an interesting fact or two about you. This is definitely not the place to include reviews of your books! If you’re a bestselling author, include that, as in, “Joe Smith is the author of the USA Today bestseller Down the Mountain in 30 Days.” The author bio is a place to state facts, not unsubstantiated praise. Praising your own work in your bio will just make you sound unprofessional.
Don’t forget the photo!
A headshot is a great way to connect with readers. Keep it simple and look into the camera. Direct eye-to-eye contact is so much better than dreamily gazing off into the distance! If your books are in the executive leadership genre, your headshot will probably look quite different from that of a romance writer or thriller writer. Whatever your genre, however, try to convey who you are in a way that will make readers want to know more about you. It’s a good idea to put a few headshots out on social media and asks your followers which one they prefer. Often, the photo of yourself you find most “attractive” will the the photo that least resonates with your audience.
Adding Books to your Amazon Author Profile
Of course, you want any book that is available on Amazon to appear on your Amazon author page. This page has evolved over the years and it looks much nicer now than it did in the early days. On your Author Central homepage, just under your profile photo, you will find a box titled “Books.” Click on “View all books.” If your books are already listed, great. If not, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the “Add a Book” button. You can then search for and add your book by title or ISBN.
Here is an example of an Amazon Author page (mine:). As you can see, the “About the Author” box featuring your profile picture and bio is at the top. Next to the “about” box, your most popular book is featured. This can change week by week, as it is automatically set to your bestselling book at any given time. Below that is a clean, easy-to-navigate grid of all of your books.
Recent Changes to Amazon Author Profiles
Until recently, Amazon allowed authors to include an RSS feed on their Amazon Author page. They ended this feature in 2022. Amazon has also gotten rid of videos, which is too bad. So if you uploaded a video to your author page in the past, it will no longer show up.
Directing Readers to Your Website or Newsletter
Although Author Central doesn’t allow links, the bio is still a good place to share your website or blog so interested readers will know where to find you. Since it’s harder to drive traffic to an unlinked site, you should offer them something special. For example, on my Amazon author profile, I provide the link to my substack author newsletter and promise something extra for signing up. Anyone who goes to the trouble to click through to my newsletter gets access to subscriber-exclusive audio stories.
Since you can’t provide an actual link, keep the url address simple. If the domain name of your author website is just your name, this keeps things streamlined. Be sure that when readers arrive at your website, they can easily find your blog, newsletter, and books.
New Author Central Feature: Recommendations
Soon after Amazon phased out blogs and video on Amazon Author profiles, it added something really cool: recommendations. Although recommendations are limited, Author Central allows you to guide readers through your books by making a few key suggestions. However, you won’t find the recommendations feature unless you go searching for it.
Here’s how to make recommendations your Author Central profile.
Once you are logged into your Author Central dashboard, click on the top menu item “Reports and Marketing.” The Book Recommendations box is now featured at the top of the page. Click on “Create Recommendation,” and then simply use the drop-down menus to fill out the following sections:
- My most talked-about book
- My book I wish more readers knew about
- If you are new to my work, I recommend starting with
- If you want to get lost in a story, I recommend my book
I really love this new recommendation feature, especially “my book I wish more readers knew about.” For example, I published a literary mystery in 2008 that sold about 75,000 copies, which felt modest at the time, coming on the heels of my first bestseller (although, in the current overly-saturated publishing world, selling 85,000 copies is nothing to scoff at!). To this day I think No One You Know is my most tightly written book, and I also love what it has to say about storytelling. Readers rarely come across it these days unless they’ve just finished one of my older novels. Now, I get to recommend it as the “book I wish more readers knew about.”
In addition to guiding readers through your own books, you get to recommend other books you love, including
- a book I couldn’t put down
- a book that left an impression on me
- “If you like my work, I think you’ll like…”
Configuring Your Audible Author Page
Your Audible page looks quite different from your Amazon Author profile page, and you can’t change it from within Audible. When you add books to your Author Central profile, be sure to add the Audible versions of your book. This way, your bio will appear on your Audible Author page.
I hope this brief guide to the Amazon Author Central page has been helpful! If you have questions, be sure to subscribe to my writing and publishing newsletter, where I am happy to answer questions in the comments section.
That’s all for now. If you haven’t yet set up your Amazon Author profile, set aside some time to do it in the next week. If you used to have one but haven’t checked in in a while, be sure to log in to your Amazon Author Central account and update your bio, books, and recommendations.
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