- Children's Book Illustrators: How Do You Price Your Artwork?
- How To Make Amazon Work For You, #3: Author Pages for Illustrators
- How to Find an Illustrator for a Children’s Book
- How to BE an Illustrator of Storybooks
Many illustrators – especially illustrators for self-published illustrated storybooks – have no Author’s Page on Amazon.
Why?
Simply because they don’t know how to get one! Author Pages for Illustrators are key to getting better visibility.
But it is very important that published artists with a book or books on the market be found on Amazon for two reasons: to sell more books and to make it that much easier to be contacted for other work. I will show you how to get your Author’s Page set up and take full advantage of it.
One of our readers (Anita Sølver, she is an illustrator, so check out her site) posted a question on the first part of this series: “I’m not sure how to make an author page on Amazon, when I’m only the illustrator. I tried going through author central, but have to claim the book as the author, and I can’t do that, since I’m not the author.”
So, how can an illustrator have an Author’s Page without being the actual author of a book? If you are the Illustrator of a book, you contributed to the book in a major way. On Amazon, this means you can claim credit as a “different kind of contributor.”
The process is pretty simple but it does involve contacting Amazon Support.
Here are the steps:
1) set up your Author Page on Amazon Author Central
2) go to the “Help”-Section and click “Contact Us” in the upper left corner
3) Select the following options (see image below): “My Books” -> “Add a Book” -> “I’m a different kind of contributor” -> “I’m the illustrator or photographer”
Claim a book as an Illustrator on Amazon
Amazon Support Staff will then decide on a case-by-case basis whether your contribution to the book warrants you claiming it and being listed – or not. If you are the illustrator for a heavily illustrated book (for example a children’s book), you shouldn’t have a problem.
If you can’t seem to make a new author account without confirming your identity as an author on Amazon, do not worry.
Start the process of creating a new account. Go to Amazon Author Central (be sure to use your local version if you publish in your region) and click on the “Join Now”-button.
You can use your normal Amazon account to log in and create an Author’s Page or use a separate new email for your publishing.
You can then choose your author name, either your real name or a pen name.
Then you are prompted to search for your book(s).
The trick comes after you click on “This is my book.” Since you are not the author, you have to click the little: “contact us”-link, as shown in the screen-shot below (red box).
Now you should be at the same point as mentioned above, where you can now claim the book as a different kind of contributor by selecting “My Books” -> “Add a Book” -> “I’m a different kind of contributor” -> “I’m the illustrator or photographer”.
Amazon Support will verify that you are listed as the illustrator of the book. Congratulations, you now have an author page on Amazon!
Make the best of it by following the tips in this article.
--Download How To Make Amazon Work For You, #3: Author Pages for Illustrators as PDF --