Ingredient X
I was kidding about El Dorado. This is much better hidden.
There’s something provided by Amazon. It’s free, it’s useful, and it’s remarkably well hidden if you don’t have its exact coordinates. It’s Amazon Author Central.
Amazon Author Central is a hybrid of the Kindle Direct Bookshelf, where you can track sales, add books, etc., and a personal profile page for you, the author. Whether it will eventually expand to other Amazon country sites, possibly not even Amazon knows.
As anyone who’s spent a few minutes wandering around Amazon scoping out the competition knows, there’s the customer reviews, and then some people have an entirely different section, called Editorial Reviews.
Editorial reviews are one of the fun things that you can only access through Amazon Author Central. Amazon doesn’t allow professional book review sites to publish reviews directly to your book sites on Amazon, but you are allowed and encouraged to take your professional review and put it into your Editorial Reviews area.
Give me directions
- https://authorcentral.amazon.com
- https://authorcentral.amazon.co.uk
- https://authorcentral.amazon.fr
- https://authorcentral.amazon.de
- https://authorcentral.amazon.co.jp
To do this from Amazon Author Central, click on the book you want to add an editorial review to, and go into the Editorial Reviews tab below the book image. You can add (a) review(s) there, as well as product descriptions, some ‘about the author’ blurb, and a number of other tidbits. Other people, to whom ‘SEO’ isn’t just a series of sounds, have written very informative articles on how to improve your search ranking by adding judicious wording in these sections; I recommend you do an Internet search and benefit from their wisdom. This is all ammunition in the war to get people to stop and buy your work of genius.
Your Author Page is another nice extra that comes with Amazon Author Central. You can add a photo, a bio, your Twitter feed, and feed(s) from your blog(s). I recommend that you actually do this in as many of the country sites as you can, even if it isn’t translated, just to show that you care. UK, France, and Germany are easy to figure out where to click and where to plug in text, although co.jp is more of a challenge,
