author central | Ana Spoke, author

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by Ana Spoke | September 21, 2015 · 11:42 am

Author (NOT SO) Central update

Hi, everyone,

Just a quick update on my last post about author pages. I am once again blown away by how useful this blog has been to me – thanks to your comments, I’ve discovered Grammarly and a number of other online resources. This time it was Kevin of New Author Online, who casually mentioned how cumbersome it is to copy your author information to author pages on other Author Central sites.

Wait. What? What other Author Central sites??

Up until then I took Amazon’s “Author Central” to mean literally that – a central resource about the author, accessible from any Amazon store, be that in the US, or UK, or Australia.

Nope.

Turns out that each and every one of the international Amazon stores has its own Author Central. What a nightmare! Also, it turns out that the Australian and Canadian Amazon sites don’t even have one. I had to quickly remedy this by setting up my UK Author Central page. Luckily the same account info worked to sign up, although I had to go through verifying my email yet again (how does this make any sense?). Also, there is no option to link the blog to the UK site (again, why are they different!!).

I’ve decided not to bother with any non-English speaking sites for now, since the chance of any readers in those markets is slim to none. Unless, of course, you tell me otherwise. oh, and thank you in advance for that!

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Filed under Self-publishing and marketing

Tagged as Amazon, author central, Book, ebook, marketing, self-publishing, writing

by Ana Spoke | September 20, 2015 · 4:20 am

Look who’s got a proper author page!

Actually, I now have three author pages…all part of my marketing ~~ploy~~ strategy. Here they are:

Amazon Author page.
Goodreads Author page.
and of course, this blog’s About page.

All complete with the new profile photo:

My previous profile photo took “profile” a little too literally. The new one was taken by my friend who just happens to be a brilliant professional photographer. Have a look at some other portraits taken by Rebecca Ramage.

Now, for some quick how-tos:

So, what do you do if you don’t have a photographer friend or a ton of money to spend on a pro? Try Starnow. It’s a website for all kinds of performance professionals – I’ve used it when I had aspirations of becoming an actor and have scored well over 40 film roles. I have also used it before to find a photographer – I simply posted an ad asking to collaborate with photographers and make up artists, and expressions of interest poured in. You see, photographers just starting out need to build their portfolios, so they are looking for models all the time. Spice up your ad by mentioning that you’re an author and watch your inbox explode! The cost is very reasonable, just a few bucks a month (I was on a 6-month subscription and it was $46 for the entire 6 months, the last time I checked. Don’t know how much it would be if you wanted just one month).

Creating Amazon’s page was easy, although you have to register separately with Author Central. For Amazon’s own guide, have a look at All About Author Central. Easy-peasy. There was, however just one little drama to report.

I wanted to link this blog to the page, but it turned out you can’t just use your URL – you need to use your RSS feed. Confused? I sure was. Thank God, it only took a few minutes to find this WordPress guide on RSS links. Don’t stress if the blog posts don’t appear on your page right away – once I’ve published a new post, they all came through.

Goodreads was just a bit more complicated. You can’t just sign up as an author – you have to sign up for a “regular” account first. If you are a first-time author, you will likely have a heart attack when you search for your book and find that it is not in the 300-million-plus database. Take a breath – you can add it, but ONLY AFTER waiting for about a day. You can, of course, send a crazed email to helpdesk, and they will do it for you after politely explaining the whole waiting a day thing. You will also have to apply to be upgraded to an author account and wait again for approval. Or send the crazed email, whatevs.

So there you go. I mean, go – get your Goodreads page started. Trust me, when the time comes, you won’t be willing to wait a whole day.