Back on January 22nd, 2009, I wrote a post about Amazon Author Stores which are also called Amazon Author Pages. In the interest of writing about them, I applied for my very own Author Page that very day. I had, frankly, forgotten all about the program until today when I got an email from Amazon letting me know my author page was finally ready.

How long does it take to be accepted into Amazon’s Author Stores and Pages program?

I applied on January 22nd and was finally activated on May 30th. So it took 4 months and 9 days for them to process my application.

Now here is what I’m wondering. Is it always going to take this long for any author that signs up or did every application submitted prior to May 30th all get processed on the same day? Until we know for sure, if you were planning on joining the program, I recommend doing it as soon as possible since there is no telling whether it will take as long to process your application as it did mine.

However, once you are accepted, you gain access to Author Central, an internal Amazon page that allows you to add a blog (via RSS), edit your profile and bibliography, join Search Inside the Book and more. If you already have an Amazon Connect page, your Author Page pulls your books and blog from that. Oddly enough, while it automatically pulled all of that info, it didn’t pull the author bio or author photos so you will still need to reupload.

Whether you are a self-published author or not, like Amazon Connect, Author Pages give you a great opportunity to connect with your readers and fans and also to promote your other stuff. Amazon doesn’t care about outside links in your blogs so you can really use it as a powerful marketing tool. Blog posts will appear not only on your profile page but also on the pages for your books so it is a great chance to introduce readers of one of your books or casual browsers to everything else you are up to.

So far, I don’t see anything to really distinguish this program from Amazon Connect so I am not sure if this is just a replacement for that program or an entirely new program based off the idea of Connect so we will just have to wait and see.

I don’t have my page entirely set up but you can preview my page here: Hillary DePiano on Amazon