AuthorCentral is basically your author dashboard for Amazon.com and Selfari. When you set up your account here you can achieve author status on Shelfari and control the content for your book sales page contents and more. You will also have an Amazon author page created for you that is accessible for shoppers on Amazon. You can also track your book sales for all of your books and formats of your books here.

As a new author I didn’t know this existed. I found this tipoff on an Amazon.com discussion forum. Since this blog is dedicated to new authors or authors looking for tips, that is the purpose of this post. I found out all of these functions myself by exploring the site and playing with the functions.

Setup

1. Go to AuthorCentral and click on the “Join Now” tab.
2. You will be asked for your Amazon.com username and password. If you don’t have one you can set it up here.
3. Once logged in, you will be asked to look up one of your books. When your book comes up click on your author name.
4. Amazon will ask “Is this you?” Click “Yes”.
5. Amazon will then process the request and send you an email when it is set up. Then you will be able to access the webpage and the author portal.

The Webpage

You can add things to you profile that people from Amazon can access. It’s very simple and strait forward. Changes will take about 24 hours to appear. If you need help, you are provided with step by step instructions when you click the “Learn More” button or the “Help” tab.  Here a list of things to add:

• Biography
• Blogs
• Events
• Author Page URL
• Photos
• Videos
• Twitter Feed

Other Tabs and Their Functions:

Sales Info: This is where you can find out where and how many of each book or/ and format for that book has been sold. This is very handy in keeping up with your sales in real time before Amazon sends this report to your publisher if you don’t use CreateSpace for your paperbacks or KDP or KDP Select for kindle books. Either way, you have instant access to your sales info from Amazon.

Books: This is where you can find your list of books and all of its information such as ranking, average review rating and editions. You can add books that are missing from your list here.  You can access Createspace and KDP here as well to publish and add books. When you click on the title of the listed book you are taken to the page where you can tweak your Amazon listing information. You have three tabs:

• Editorial reviews: You can add reviews that people write for you that aren’t posted as an editorial review.  If you must make a change, you must contact Amazon from this page. You can tweak you product description here. You can add other extras such as “from the author”, “about the author”, “from the inside flap”, “from the back cover”. These will appear on your book listing on Amazon.com
• Book Details: Details about your book such as: publisher, # of pages, publication date, and language are listed. There is a function to suggest updates if needed.
• Book extras: This is the stuff you add to your book that appears on Shelfari such as characters, settings, etc. To link this to Shelfari after filling it out click the “Visit Shelfari.com” link. This is how you link the accounts together to achieve author status on Shelfari.

***Note: If you make  changes on one of the editions it won’t show up for the others. You must make the change to each edition in turn. To do so you click on the edition in the editions box in the top right corner and follow the same procedure listed above.

Customer Reviews: These are the reviews people leave on your book with their corresponding star ratings. These cannot be changed by you.

Profile: The second option to access you AuthorCentral webpage and its components.

Help: Self explanatory. Another way to find and access the help you need for setup