Building Your Author Brand Foundation

Marketing Insights analyzes key author presences and related activity, engagement, and performance data, highlighting trends and change over time. An analysis of the primary author’s brand presences and audience interest can be found in the Author Engagement panel.

Ensure your authors have up-to-date and active online presences on leading consumer-facing sites and platforms.  These presences support title marketing, improve author branding, and help to associate authors correctly with their titles, topics, series, and characters.

Key author presences

Fill these profiles out as completely as possible to provide detail and context, allowing potential readers to learn more about an author—and signaling to Amazon and search engines all of the works connected to the author.

• Amazon Author Central Page
  An Amazon author page helps connect an author to all their titles within the Amazon universe. It also provides readers with the opportunity to follow authors for updates on events, new books, and new blog posts.
  
  
• Goodreads Author page
  Goodreads is owned by Amazon and is an authoritative source of information on authors. It’s used by millions of readers to track, rate, and review what they’re reading and to connect and engage with authors.
  
  
• Wikipedia page
  Authors with published works usually qualify for a Wikipedia listing. Wikipedia is a primary source of author data for search engines like Google, and author Wikipedia page views are a good indicator of potential online book sales. Make sure information is accurate and up-to-date, including a complete bibliography.

Maintain accurate and fresh information

Reflect ongoing activities and up-to-date information where potential buyers are likely to find it. Keep these presences updated, and make sure to link between them when possible.

• Update the author bio with the latest titles, news, and promotions.
• Complete every field, and link to any and all other presences and sites.
• Include a high-quality recent author image.
• Where possible, provide updates on news and media coverage, new content, events, and more.

Other presences to consider

Additional consumer-facing platforms, profiles, and pages can help broaden an author’s footprint and ensure that potential readers and fans can find the author wherever they happen to be looking.

• LibraryThing
  Consider adding and updating information on LibraryThing, which enables rich, structured book and author data.

• Social profiles
  Social media profiles can help round out an author’s web presence, even if they’re not frequently used. Select good-fit social networks that your target audiences actively use; fill in ‘bio’, ‘about’, and other fields; and post engaging content.

• Author and publisher-owned websites
  Your owned and controlled sites should be the authoritative source and central hub for information on the author, their life, and works. Include links to all external profiles and presences.

References & Resources

• Author Central portal [Amazon]
• Goodreads Author Program [Goodreads]
• Contributing to Wikipedia [Wikipedia]
• LibraryThing Author pages [LibraryThing]