Amazon promises better visibility for authors on its site

Just received an e-mail from Amazon’s Author Central, which promises some feature upgrades, but nothing specific. The message isn’t on Amazon’s site, so I’m posting it here in its entirety.

In a nutshell: Amazon is inserting links from book detail pages to author profile pages. Look about halfway down the pages linked below, and you’ll see a thumbnail image of the author, and the link “More About the Author.”

Amazon says it may also add these links to Kindle edition pages.

My take: Authors have taken it on the chin this past year. Amazon killed its Connect author blogging program, and removed all traces of that content from book detail pages and Amazon’s home page.

Certainly there was a need to trim Amazon’s cluttered book detail pages. But in the process, they’ve revoked the best tools authors had for juicing their Amazon sales. Authors still can’t post blog content for a specific title. Heck, there still isn’t a reliable way to correct errors with Amazon’s bibliographic data. You might as well send a fax to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the meantime, a startup, FiledBy, has begun offering authors free basic Web sites. So here’s Amazon’s response. I guess it’s better than nothing. After all, why would anyone “blog” on Amazon’s site if there’s no way for anyone to find the content? I’ve noticed that hits on my Amazon profile have dropped off by more than 80 percent this year.

Here’s the message from the Amazon.com Author Central Team:

We are excited to let you to know about a simple but important change that will help many more Amazon customers find Author Pages and Author Blogs and learn more about you and your work.

In short: We now link to Author Pages from book detail pages on Amazon. A new feature called “More About the Author” can be found right under the Product Details section on book detail pages. Examples below:

http://www.amazon.com/Skeletons-at-Feast-Chris-Bohjalian/dp/0307394964/

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Man-Elinor-Lipman/dp/0618644660

http://www.amazon.com/Goth-Girl-Rising-Barry-Lyga/dp/0547076649

This is a simple and perhaps obvious feature. But it’s also one that many authors asked us about, so we wanted to tell you the good news as we rolled it out. We thought it also might be a good opportunity to share a bit about what we’ve been doing with Author Central and what to expect from us in the coming weeks and months.

At Amazon, we’ve made our goal to give authors a more prominent “customer-facing” role within our store. This will not only be helpful and fun for Amazon customers, but we love the idea of enabling authors to better promote themselves and their work and to reach both fans and new readers. In pursuit of this goal, we think Author Pages is a great new feature. They are further improved by the data you contribute via Author Central. So why wait to launch “More About the Author”? And what about features like Author Blogs?

When we build something new at Amazon, we often introduce it in a “soft” way at first, allowing us time to work out some kinks before we increase its prominence within our store. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had the chance to find and fix any number of bugs, many of which you told us about (We’re not done, of course, so please keep the feedback coming!)

As we’ve improved Author Pages, we’ve steadily made it easier to find them. For example, a few weeks ago we made them easier to find in search. We also added a link from author names on detail pages (take a look right under the book title on a detail page – hovering over a hyperlinked author name will yield a link to the relevant Author Page). “More About the Author” is another step forward as we methodically increase the prominence of author information across our store.

Of course, there’s still so much to do – we have many new features in the works, including improvements to what you see already. For example, we want to allow customers to navigate from Kindle detail pages to Author Pages the same way they do from detail pages for physical books. Also, the current “More About the Author” feature is extremely simple — it doesn’t yet do “smart” things like link directly to fresh Author Blog content. We expect to add both of these features in the coming weeks. (If you’re wondering about the change from the “old” Author Blog feature, the simple explanation is that the previous implementation proved a relatively inefficient use of detail page space. We want those pages to be as tuned as possible to selling your books –we think our new implementation will not detract from that goal while still exposing your Author Blog content for interested customers.)

So stay tuned and thanks for your patience and support while we keep improving the beta version of Author Central. Contact us any time at: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us.

Best regards,

The Amazon Author Central Team
http://authorcentral.amazon.com

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Steve Weber is author of ePublish: Self-Publish Fast and Profitably for Kindle, iPhone, CreateSpace and Print on Demand

and Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

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