Today’s Techie bit is author centric. Though I think most things I’ve posted about here are that way, mostly in an effort to help my fellow authors who may not be as tech or craft-savvy.

Promotion is a tricky thing for most authors. Too much? Too little? None at all? The preference is really your own, but lean too far toward the too much side and you risk annoying potential readers.

One easy thing to do is make sure you have an author page with Amazon. Why particularly Amazon? Well, they offer the service for free, so why not take advantage of it. Plus, the fact of the matter is, a large portion of sales derive from the monster that is Amazon. All the more reason to sign up.

It’s easy to get to. Just enter https://authorcentral.amazon.com in your search bar and away you go. If you don’t have an Author Account with Amazon, you’ll need to sign up for one here. Once you do, you’ll arrive at the home landing page, which looks like this:

From here you can see charts of your sales, add a feed for your blog, Twitter, add/update your bio.add events you’re attending/speaking at, etc. You can also edit any of your book blurbs here and even add review snippets. When you’re finished adding/tweeking all those things, you’ll end up with something that looks like this:

As you can see, I’ve got my Twitter feed, a blog feed for latest posts, my bio at the top and then there’s the list of my books Amazon offers. There’s even the Stay Up To Date sign up link I talked about last week for getting notified when your favorite authors have a new release.

There are certainly other retailers with offer similar services. All Romance eBooks also allows authors to have a customized profile. Theirs isn’t as self-service as Amazon’s is, but does help your page have an appealing look in their webstore.

Updating this page takes an email to their staff with the information you want added. However, if you self-publish, I believe you may be able to control this page yourself. Can anyone verify?

These are just the ones I’m aware of myself (excluding sites like Goodreads, which aren’t booksellers), if there any of you know that you’d like to share – leave a comment!