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You can add up to eight videos to your Amazon author page. These can include book trailers, footage of your cats napping – anything is fair game as long as it adheres to Amazon’s content guidelines.

Prerequisites

• You already have an Amazon author page.
• Your video must be:
  • Less than 500 MB.
  • In one of the following formats: AVI, FLV, MOV, MPG, WMV, or MP4.
  • No more than 10 minutes long.
• You have an actual video to upload; embedding videos on sites like YouTube is not supported.

Adding a video

Note that the URLs will vary if you’re editing your author page on one of the other Amazon sites (.co.uk, .de, etc.).

• Log in to Amazon Author Central.
• Click on Author Profile in the menu at the top of the page.
• In the Videos section at the bottom of the right sidebar, click “add video.”
• Select your file, confirm your acceptance of the terms & conditions, and click “Upload video.”
• Wait. 🙂

It can take up to 24 hours for your video to be processed and displayed on your author page. Amazon will send you an email when this is complete.

The video will be displayed in the Author Updates section underneath the scrolling display of book cover images.

An image will be randomly selected from the beginning of the video to use for the still image that appears when the video isn’t playing.

Reference: Amazon’s help page on uploading videos.

There are two options for displaying your blog on Goodreads.

1. Link your existing blog to your author profile.
2. Create a blog on Goodreads as part of your author profile.

    
   If you don’t have an author website, and don’t plan to have one, option #2 may be for you. If, however, you do have or plan to have your own website, it’s very quick and easy to link your blog to your author profile on Goodreads.

   Your blog posts will be displayed underneath the biography section on your author profile page.

   
    
    

   Note: If you’re interested in how I got the social media buttons to display at the top of my bio, instructions are in this post:
   Adding social media buttons to your Goodreads author profile

   Here’s what the reader will see if they click on the name of your blog, which appears in between your biography and your blog posts on your author profile.

   

   How to link your blog to your author profile

   • Log in to your Goodreads author account, and edit your author profile.
   • On the right-hand side of the screen, click on the “edit blog” link.
   • The “Editing Your Blog” page is displayed.
      
     
      
     You want to link to your existing blog, so ignore the Title and Description fields.
      
     On the right-hand side there’s an option to set an “External blog feed URL.” This is where you’ll post the link to your blog’s feed (i.e. the stream of posts on your blog). Enter your URL.
      
     In my case, my URL is http://jamieferguson.com/feed. The URL to your blog’s feed may be in a different format depending on how your website is set up.
   • There will be one option: “Show full post.” Select this if you want the complete text of each post to display on Goodreads. If you don’t select this, readers will only see the first part of your post, and will have to expand to view the complete text.
      
     I’ve chosen to not display the full posts in order to have more of my posts appear on the screen, but either option is fine.
   • Click “Add Feed,” and you’re done!
      
    

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Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that packages a number of features that are provided to people whose sites are hosted on WordPress.com. If you’re hosting your site on WordPress.com, you already have these features; if you’re hosting your site somewhere, you will need to install the Jetpack plugin (which is free).

The Related Posts feature analyzes previous posts you’ve published on your site, then underneath each individual post it displays links to three other posts that are related to your current post.

If you’ve set a featured image for a post, that’s what will display when it’s listed as a related post; otherwise, an image attached to the post will be used. The image will be resized and cropped to be 350x200px.

Note that if the contextual analysis doesn’t come up with at least three good results, no related posts will be displayed.

Activate Related Posts

In the administrative section of your WordPress site:

• Go to Jetpack / Settings / Traffic
• Under Related posts, turn on “Show related content after posts”

There are two configuration options listed:

• Show a “Related” header to more clearly separate the related section from posts
• Use a large and visually striking layout
  (This will display an image from each related post.)

Note: When I turn ‘Show a “Related” header’ on, that actually turns it off – although it correctly displays in the preview while you’re configuring Jetpack. 🙂

Here are examples of how the different permutations will look.

No header, no images

“Related” header, no images

No header, display images

“Related” header, display images

Customize Related Posts for your site

You can customize what image is displayed, how the image is resized, change the “Related” header text, modify how many related posts are displayed, and a number of other things.

Most of these changes require modifying your WordPress theme, so make sure you’re comfortable with that (and that you’ve backed up your site!) before proceeding. Jetpack provides detailed instructions on how to modify your WordPress theme on their site.

You can do all kinds of things with a custom tab on a Facebook page. Link to a book landing page, link to a page of cat videos…the sky’s the limit. 🙂

In this image, you can see a custom tab named “Bundles” at the bottom of the left sidebar on a Facebook page. When you click on that tab, the content you specify will be displayed in the middle of the page – to the right of the sidebar, and below your cover photo and the Like, Follow, etc. buttons.

You can add multiple custom tabs to a page. This means you can create a custom tab for a new release, one for your fiction, one for a sale, etc.

Here’s how!

Prerequisites

These instructions assume you’ve already set up:

• A Facebook profile.
• A Facebook page.
• The page you want to display when someone clicks on your custom tab.

Steps to create a custom tab

• Log in to Facebook as a developer.
   
  Don’t be alarmed by this. You don’t actually need to know anything about software development. 🙂
   
  Go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps, and log in with your normal Facebook credentials.
• Click the “+ Add a New App” button. A dialog with the title “Create a New App ID” will pop up.
  
  The ‘Display Name’ is the name that will be used for the tab you’re creating. Set this value, pick your category, then click on “Create App ID.”
   
• You should now be in your App Dashboard. Click “Settings” in the left sidebar, then click “+ Add Platform,” which appears near the bottom of the main window.
   
• Select “Page Tab” as your platform.
   
• For “Secure Page Tab URL,” enter the URL to the web page you want to have displayed inside your Facebook page when a user selects the new tab.
  Make sure to use a secure URL (i.e. the URL must start with https://,
  not http://).
   
• Save.
   
• In your browser, substitute the specified parameters, then go to http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL. Replace YOUR_APP_ID with the app id in your app’s settings, and replace YOUR_URL with the Secure Page Tab URL.
   
  For example:
  http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=1234567890&next=https://yourdomain.com/pagename
   
  • If you’re using Chrome, you may find that it attempts to search for this URL, instead of taking you to it. I’m sure there’s a super easy solution for this, but I got annoyed and entered the URL in a different browser. 🙂
     
  • If you find you get an error 191, add the website’s home URL (in my case, this was blackbirdpublishing.com) to the “App Domains” field, which should appear near the top of the page.
     
• The Add Page Tab dialog should appear, asking you which Facebook page(s) you’d like to add your new tab to. Select the appropriate page.
   
• Test to verify that this is working and that your custom content looks right. It’s also a good idea to view your content on other devices, like your phone or table.

Now what?

Create another custom tab, of course! 🙂

One note: I originally pointed to my publishing website’s bundle page, which has a header and a sidebar. That looked kind of weird when viewed through Facebook, so I created a special header-less, sidebar-less page on my website. That page looks okay, but I’m going to play with it to make sure the content is optimized for Facebook instead of for my website.