How to Post Author Updates at Amazon Author Central if You Don’t Have a Blog

Author Sylvia EngdahlGuest Post
by Sylvia Engdahl

The Author Update area at Amazon Author Central makes provision only for blog feeds and events. This is unfortunate for authors who don’t have blogs, or who blog at their personal websites. I don’t often have news, but when I do I would like to post it at Author Central, and I’d like to announce when a book is going to be free or discounted.

Recently it occurred to me to investigate what a blog feed consists of. It doesn’t have to come from an established blogging site — its address can point to a file located anywhere on the Web. It turns out to be easy to create such a file and upload it to your own Web host. Then you merely have to update it whenever you have a brief message for your readers. You could, in fact, put articles of any length in it by continuing what wouldn’t fit on the Author Central page on a page at your website. Or, if you have an email newsletter that’s also posted online, you could use this method to get headlines from it and a subscribe link onto your Author Central page. Continue reading “How to Post Author Updates at Amazon Author Central if You Don’t Have a Blog”

Blogging for Dollars: How to Sell Your Blog on Amazon

You sell your ebooks on Amazon, perhaps, but did you know you could sell subscriptions to your blog there, as well?

That’s one way Barry Parham, award-winning author of humor columns, short stories, and essays, is getting more eyeballs on his work. He started syndicating his weekly humor column, My Weekly Mooncalf, partly through his own blog subscriptions and partly via Kindle downloads from Amazon. “It wasn’t hard to do,” Parham said, “but I did need a quick primer on RSS, and in my case, WordPress.” Continue reading “Blogging for Dollars: How to Sell Your Blog on Amazon”