How to Setup Amazon's New Book Recommendations Feature in Your Author Central Account

How to Setup Amazon’s New Book Recommendations Feature in Your Author Central Account
Stephanie Chandler

Amazon has unveiled a feature all authors can take advantage of, regardless of how your book is published. You can now add book recommendations to your Author Central account, which has several benefits. First, and perhaps most importantly, Amazon says if you submit at least three book recommendations, it MAY send an email notifying readers.

Reader notification emails are part of the Amazon marketing engine. For example, when readers follow author Martha Beck or buy one or more of her books, Amazon tracks this information. When Beck releases a new book, her readers and followers receive an email from Amazon letting them know it’s available.

Amazon is also tracking your sales and readers.

When you release your next book, you won’t be notified if and when Amazon sends one of these marketing emails, but your readers may let you know! I’ve had these emails forwarded to me by my readers. This is fantastic free promotion, especially for writers who author multiple books.

And you don’t have to be a prolific writer to benefit from this new feature. Adding recommendations also elevates the look and feel of your author page on Amazon, and you are invited to recommend books by other authors, which can also get featured through Amazon’s email marketing engine.

How to Set up Book Recommendations in Your Author Central Account on Amazon

1. Login to your Author Central Account: https://author.amazon.com/home.

2. Go to the Reports and Marketing tab and click on Create Recommendation.

3. Fill in the fields for your most talked about book and the book you wish more readers knew about.

4. For authors with more than two books, you can also complete the additional questions:

“If you’re new to my work, I recommend starting with my book…” and

“If you want to get lost in a story, I recommend my book…”

Note that Amazon only allows you to recommend each of your books one time so this particular feature is tailored to authors with several active titles to your credit. (I have more titles but chose not to recommend them since they are older and no longer relevant to what I do today.)

5. Scroll down and you can recommend three books by authors you admire. Answer the following questions with your book picks:

“If you like my work, I think you’ll like…”

“A book I couldn’t put down was…”

“A book that left an impression on me was…”

When choosing your titles, make sure to choose books that appeal to your ideal audience. Amazon will remind you that your recommendations may be shared by email.

6. It may take a day or so for your recommendations to appear on your profile, though be sure to take a peek at your profile because the layout has also changed. Here’s mine:

Keep scrolling through the book recommendations above to see your titles listed as well.

Next Steps

Make sure to set these book recommendations up on your Author Central page as soon as possible! As more authors discover this feature, Amazon may get overwhelmed with recommendations and yours could get buried in the shuffle. Hopping on board with opportunities like these early often has some added benefits.

Amazon Author Central Profiles Available Internationally

At this time, Amazon only allows book recommendations in Author Central profiles in the US and UK. Presumably, they will roll out this feature to other Amazon properties over the coming months.

And if you don’t already know this, you’re allowed to set up Author Central accounts in other countries, if you choose to do so. Simply go to each site and join to create an Author Central account.

Following is a list of international Amazon sites where Author Central profiles are currently allowed.