Setting up Amazon Author pages internationally

(This post has been moved.)

One of the challenges of indie publishing is taking responsibility for your brand all over the world. Amazon, like many online book retailers, provides an Author page to serve as the base of operations for telling readers about your works, and every author is well-advised to take full advantage of it.

When you begin to look to Amazon's international sites, however, things become a little stranger. The naive publisher rejoices in only having to publish a book once using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) and letting Amazon do the hard work of making it available at all of its international sites. That works just fine for your product, but everything else — Author pages, Affiliate pages — they don't work that way. Each Amazon international site maintains its own Author and Affiliate pages, and presents them in its own native language, of course.

It can be intimidating the first time you look at a website in a language you don't speak. But you can easily set up Author and Affiliate presences on these sites because Amazon has designed the pages very similarly for each country, and the actual content (like your book) is assumed to be in your own language.

To begin with, it's not what you don't know that's the problem, it's what you know that isn't so. For example, it's natural to assume that each international Amazon site has an author page and an affiliate page somewhere.  Not true.  As Amazon rolls out each new country, it may or may not have such capabilities initially (or ever).

The sites can be rather different in unexpected ways.  For example, Amazon Canada has no Author pages (yet), CreateSpace paperbacks are not sold there automatically (though retailers using the expanded distribution channels show up eventually), and it took a while for the Associates pages to show up.  In a few months, you might find Author pages on Amazon Canada.  If Amazon ever announces that sort of upgrade, I've never heard about it, so it pays to keep checking back.

As of this writing, here's the situation for the oldest Amazon sites:

Author & Affiliate: USA, UK, France, Germany
Affiliate only: Canada, Italy, Spain

I'll leave a discussion of Affiliate sites for another day, just be aware that sometimes the opening page differs between countries and you might need to check that you're in the place you expect to be in the navigation menu.  Otherwise it's a very similar situation to the Author pages.

Let's add a list of our books to the French and German sites.  Using the English language sites (USA, UK) as a model, we see that “Books” is the menu item we're going to want.  For the French and German sites, we don't have to know what “Livres” and “Bucher” mean, necessarily, because they are in the same location on the menu.

 

 

Keep two tabs open and look at the English language version guide as a model for the French or German sites.

Notice that my books don't appear.  That's because the page defaults to “All formats” vs “English language books” (the links below the button).. If I click the “English language books” link, then my books will appear.

The same reasoning applies when you click the “Add more books” button in its German form to add your books for the first time.  You must select “English language books” from the menu before supplying your name or other id, or it won't find any of your books.

From here on, you can work your way through the Author page and its various options using the English language version as your guide. Just keep in mind to always look for the “English language books” choices.

Notice that even though I have English language books on my Author page,

nonetheless it may not be easy to see them as a reader.

When a reader clicks on my author name from a book listing, it takes them to my Author page but no books are visible.  That is a flaw in the website design. My books are found when the reader clicks on “English language books” in the top menu.  When he finds a book of mine and clicks on the Author name, he leaves the “English language books” environment and goes to an Author page that does not present any choice for the English language list  (bottom of image).

If this happens to you, do not despair.  Put your books in, and pray it will be fixed eventually. Reporting it to Amazon is not…. productive.