Amazon Author Central
Once your book is listed on Amazon.com, you can set up and Amazon Author Central page, which is a page Amazon customers can click on to learn more about you and your books. Author Central pages will be linked to all your product pages on Amazon.com.

First, go to this link and log in to Amazon.com. http://tinyurl.com/2ats3cp. An information page will come up. At the bottom is the option to “Join Now.” Click on that. Accept their terms and agreements, then follow the steps to set up your page. You’ll have to select your books from the list. You can also add your author picture, a bio, a link to your blog, more pictures, a video or book trailer, and participate in discussions that readers start.

Another neat feature on Amazon.com is to set up the Search Inside the Book feature. You can do this from your Author Central page. Keep in mind that this is something your publisher might do for you, so you should check with your publicist to see if it’s okay before you set this up on your own.

If you own your own rights to any of your novels, there is information listed on your Author Central page about how to put your book for sale on Amazon Kindle.

Amazon Associates
When you post your book covers on your own websites, you should link them to an online store. If you do, you should also sign up for an affiliate program with that store. Most online stores have an affiliates program. This gives you a special code in your link so that when someone clicks on it, the store knows you sent them and you get a commission if a sale results.

This is easy money. Not a lot, but it can add up. Since I sell most of my books on Amazon, I signed up for Amazon Associates. (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/) They have a variety of widgets you can paste right onto your website or blog. Or you can copy the link and embed it into a cover image of your book, which is what I do for all the images on my www.NovelTeen.com blog.

If you prefer to support a different store, I know that Barnes and Noble and ChristianBook.com both have affiliate programs. Do a search online to find them.

Listmania Lists
These are lists that Amazon customers make. Usually they are lists of favorites. As an author, you wouldn’t want to make tons of lists with your own books on them. But you might come up with a clever way to include your book in a list or two. Think of what your target reader might search for. One of the lists I made is called “Kindle Christian Fantasy.” So I select a bunch of titles that fit this heading and include my own books.

Like I said, this isn’t something you, the author, would want to abuse, but you could recruit some of your fans or influencers to make a Listmania lists that include your titles.

Here is the link to create Listmania lists: http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/createpipeline

Tagging Books
Anyone can tag any book on Amazon as long as they have an Amazon account. Go to any product page, scroll down past the product information, past the reviews, and you’ll find a section called “Tags Customers Associate with This Product.” Here is a list of tags that people have clicked on. If you look and see that your book has nothing here, that’s not so good. Here is what is listed for my book, By Darkness Hid.

fantasy(20), epic fantasy(14), teen(14)
christian fantasy(13), speculative fiction(13), adventure(12)
christianity(12), kindle(12), medieval fantasy(9), teen fantasy(9)
Agree with these tags?
See all 22 tags…

This shows me that twenty people have tagged this book “fantasy,” fourteen tagged it “epic fantasy,” fourteen tagged it “teen,” and so on. So if a shopper goes looking for an epic fantasy for teens, By Darkness Hid will show up on the list, though probably pretty far down with only those amount of tags. 🙂

You can only tag your books once. But this is another thing you can ask your fans or influencers to do for you. For them, it can be as easy as logging in and clicking on that link that says, “Agree with these tags?”

Anyone else have some other ideas of how to use Amazon.com to market their books?

Visit Jill’s website by clicking here.