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.).
Jessamyn and her grandmother, Marie, return to the Isle of Skye for one purpose only: to lay Granmarie’s personal ghosts to rest.
But confronting old memories of her lost love sends Granmarie into an odd sort of reverie, one that soon catches Jess in its grip as well. Why do they both hear the same haunting melody?
And what secrets lie in the heart of the woodland behind the White Skye Inn?
In “They Stole My Love Last Night,” Celtic fairies, music, and ghosts collide, turning a bitter story sweet.
Alexandra Brandt spent most of her childhood dressing up in fairy wings and parading in front of the mirror telling stories to herself. Not much has changed – she still loves a good costume, and tells herself stories every day. Two of her recent short stories are appearing in Fiction River anthologies in 2017.
When not spinning tales, reading, or debating worldbuilding details with her writer husband, she writes web copy and functions as a content marketer and graphic designer. She also dabbles in art, watches too many Sci-Fi TV shows, and welcomes any excuse to sit down and play tabletop games – from D&D to board games to cards.
The summer sun bathes the earth in warmth and light, Faeries dance under the moon at night. Cross through the portal into a land ancient, beautiful, and wild. See the wonders that enticed the stolen child. Come away, O reader! To the Realm of Faerie. But if you want to make it back home, you had better be wary…
This collection includes twenty tales of faeries and magic set in our world – and in others.
There are two options for displaying your blog on Goodreads.
Link your existing blog to your author profile.
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.
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.
Misha Millik, a hearth witch brought to Chisolm Keep by the headmaster, feels out of her depth at this magic school for the children of established magicians.
Branded a misfit by the wealthy students, she finds a friend in a stray cat who can talk to her. Desperately unhappy and completely inept at any kind of magic the school teaches, she wonders why the headmaster insists she stay at the school.
When she finds the horrifying answer, will her humble powers be enough to save herself and find her true place as a practicing witch?
Thea Hutcheson explores far away lands full of magic and science with one hand holding hope and the other full of wonder. She lives in an economically depressed, unscenic, nearly historic small city in Colorado with four semi-feral cats, 1000 books, and an understanding partner. She’s a factotum when she’s filling the time between bouts at the computer.
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.
Chuck writes quirky short stories, usually with some sort of fantastical element. He’s as surprised by this as anyone. Even after dozens of stories he stills stays up too late at night, feverishly working on the next tale.
He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his beautiful wife and their three daughters.
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. 🙂
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.
Alicia was tired of spending nights alone in her empty little house, and was willing to try something weird or something stupid if it would keep Horatio at home.
Her friends told her how to find the house of a witch who lived in a house with a door made from wood stolen from the coffins of newly-risen dead.
Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.
His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.
He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to professional publications such as Analog, Asimov’s, and several other magazines and anthologies (including several editions of the Fiction River Anthology Series).
He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time–which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
A copyright information page will generally include more than just copyright information. Publication information, disclaimers, and design accreditation also appear on this page.
Note that I’m not a lawyer, and am not providing legal advice.
Where should the copyright information page go?
For a print book, this page should go in the front matter at the beginning of the book. I put mine after the title page, which is what’s most commonly done, but it doesn’t have to go in that exact spot – and of course what’s in the front matter will vary by book, publisher, and author. Look through print books that you consider well-formatted for examples. Note that the copyright information page always appears on the left page in a print book.
For an ebook, this page can go in the front matter, but it’s more commonly put in the back matter, at the end of the book. If your book is available on a website that allows readers to see a preview, placing the copyright page in the front means there’s one less page available for the preview. And while you can and should care about this page, it’s highly likely that your readers won’t.
Note that the order in which these elements occur can vary. I suggest you look at other ebooks to decide how you’d like your page to look.
Book title
Author name
This isn’t required, but some authors list their name under the title. I don’t include this in my books.
Edition
This isn’t required, but it’s good practice to note the edition if it’s not the first edition.
Work of fiction disclaimer
There’s some question as to whether or not this is necessary, but I put one in just to be safe.
Copyright notice
Refer to a resource like NOLO’s The Copyright Handbook for more information on the various format options and legal requirements.
Here’s an example of what I use in my books:
Copyright Ⓒ 2017 by Jamie Ferguson
All rights reserved statement
I’ve read that this is not required, but I include this text – partly because almost everyone still uses it, and that way my copyright page looks like a standard page. There is no one right way to word this text – I looked through examples in other books, and based on that came up with something I now use in each of my books.
Publisher information
This is your publishing press name and URL. You can also include a mailing address and/or other contact information. If you don’t have a publishing press, list yourself as the publisher.
Credit section
If you use stock images, or had an artist design your cover or format the interior, this is where you give them credit. Refer to the stock image site or the designer you worked with to determine if there is specific language you’re required to use. Here’s an example of how mine looks:
Cover design Ⓒ 2017 Blackbird Publishing
Cover art copyright Ⓒ Artist | Stock Image Company
Library of Congress Control Number
This is only required if you’ve gotten a Library of Congress Control Number. Chances are you have not. 🙂
ISBN number
If you have an ISBN, it should be listed on this page.
Country the book is printed in
This isn’t required, but is often done in print books.
How do you make sure to do this in each book?
I have templates that I use when formatting my books – one for print and one for ebook. On the copyright information page, the pieces I need to update, or at least review (like the copyright year) are highlighted so that I know exactly what I need to look at for each book. I occasionally tweak my template, but even when I do, just having it already set up means I don’t have to remember all of these details every time.
Do you really need a copyright information page?
Not being a lawyer 🙂 I can’t say if you need one or not – but there’s no reason I can think of to not include one. Plus there’s a lot of information on these pages in addition to the copyright notice. For example, if you’re licensing someone else’s artwork for your cover, you’ve probably signed an agreement that requires you to acknowledge the source of the imagery. These pages are also very standard in the industry, and not having one will look odd.
Copyright notices, as opposed to pages, are not required for works published after March 1, 1989, but there are a number of very good reasons to add them anyway.
If you’d like to learn more, or have specific questions about what is/is not technically correct, please refer to NOLO’s The Copyright Handbook, or one of the many other great resources available.
