Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026
A reader finishes your book at eleven at night, likes it, and taps your name. Amazon takes them to your author page. There’s a bio, a list of your titles, a Follow button. There is nothing on that page they can click to reach you, and no way for you to know they were ever there.
That gap is the whole argument. Author Central is a shopfront inside somebody else’s shop, and the shop is full of people already holding a wallet. Your own site has none of that traffic. What it has is your name on the door.
Disclosure before we go further: we sell formatting, A+ content and author websites, and the website is £199 plus £15 a month care. Most of what follows argues against selling you one.
This is the comparison only. If you haven’t set the profile up yet, our Amazon Author Central UK setup guide covers the account, claiming your books and writing the bio. Do that first. And if what you actually want is a straight yes-or-no on whether you need a website yet, do authors need a website? answers that directly — this article is the feature-by-feature detail behind that answer.
What Amazon Author Central does well
Amazon’s KDP help page lists what you can do inside Author Central. Verbatim, it’s:
- “Add your books to your Author Page”
- “Add your biography in different languages”
- “Check Amazon Best Sellers Rank”
- “Check Customer Reviews”
- “Add Editorial Reviews for your books (US feature only)”
- “Check BookScan sales information (US feature only)”
- “Check the number of Amazon followers”
Two of the seven are marked US-only: Editorial Reviews and BookScan sales data. Publish from the UK and you get five, with no sales figures at all.
Three of them matter more than most authors expect.
Your bio is the only part of Amazon that sounds like you. It lives on the Author Page, which is where a reader lands when they click your name under a book title. Leave it blank and there’s a page with your name on it and nothing to read.
Claiming your editions matters more than the bio does. Write under one name with a paperback, a Kindle edition and an audiobook, and claiming them means a reader who clicks your name sees all three rather than the one title they landed on. Series authors get more out of those two hours than out of almost anything else they’ll do that week.
Author pages also rank. They surface in ordinary search results for author-name queries, on URLs like amazon.com/stores/author/B0XXXXXXXX and the .co.uk equivalent. What we see on client launches is the Amazon page beating a brand-new author domain for the author’s own name, and holding that position until the site has some age and some links behind it.
Then there’s Follow. A reader clicks it, and Amazon may email them when your next book appears. No list to maintain, no platform fee. That “may” is doing a lot of work.
One UK note. A UK author gets a fully editable Author Central page. A reader on Amazon.com.au or Amazon.ca is looking at a page built from your US information that nobody can edit, which is a reason to set the US store up properly even if you never expect to sell a copy there.
Where Amazon Author Central stops
Nothing on the page links back to you
Author bios aren’t hyperlinked. Type your web address into the bio and it sits there as plain text. Kindlepreneur’s guide, updated 20 November 2025, is blunt about it: “Amazon doesn’t let you have direct hyperlinks in these bios, but you can still put them there, and people can copy/paste the urls into their browser to find you.” Formatting is out as well: “You’ll need to keep it plain text (no fancy bold, italics, HTML, etc.)”
Amazon’s A+ Content guidelines, which govern the enhanced module blocks on your detail page, prohibit “Web links or language attempting to redirect to other sites inside or outside of Amazon (including your other products)”, along with off-Amazon contact details and any pricing or promotional language.
So a reader who wants more of you has to retype your address from memory, usually on a phone, having just closed the book. That’s why a short domain matters more for an author than for most businesses. If yours is sarah-j-mitchell-author-books.co.uk, that reader is gone. If it’s sarahjmitchell.co.uk, some of them arrive.
You never meet your followers
Here’s Amazon’s own description of what Follow delivers, quoted exactly:
“Your followers will be notified of your book’s release or availability for pre-order on our website if your book is eligible, your followers allow marketing emails from Amazon, and if they haven’t already placed an order for your new book.”
Read the conditions. Amazon decides eligibility. The reader has to permit Amazon’s marketing emails. The notification is Amazon’s message, sent on Amazon’s schedule, in Amazon’s template, about a product Amazon sells. You can check how many followers you have. You cannot see who they are, message them, segment them, or take them with you when you move.
A list you own costs nothing to start: MailerLite’s free tier covers your first 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, as of August 2026 (these limits move — MailerLite cut them from 500 subscribers and 12,000 emails on 1 July 2026, so check the current figure before you rely on it). We’ve put the platforms side by side in our newsletter platform comparison. Those 250 readers can be emailed on the day you choose, about anything, including a book Amazon doesn’t stock.
Neither replaces the other. Amazon’s follow graph reaches people who will never join a mailing list. Your list reaches people who said yes to you specifically.
You can’t tell what’s working
Go back to those seven bullets. Sales rank, reviews, follower count, and US-only BookScan data. Page views aren’t in Amazon’s published feature list, and neither is where a visitor came from or which book they clicked. So rewriting your bio is a change you make and never measure. On your own site that’s a five-minute question with a number attached.
The page belongs to Amazon and it changes
In December 2022 Amazon rebuilt the author page and dropped features from it. Written Word Media’s guide, last updated 7 March 2023, records that “As of December 2022, Amazon removed blog feeds from U.S. profiles”, and that extra photos and videos stopped displaying on US author pages. It says those features survived outside the US, where “blogs can be linked to your Amazon author page and show previews of recent articles”.
By late 2025 the picture had moved again, and without the regional carve-out. Kindlepreneur’s 20 November 2025 update says: “It used to be that Amazon would let you add different media like a feed for your blog, or certain videos like a book trailer. Unfortunately, Amazon removed that capability.” The same update reports that Amazon “removed the ability to customize your URL, and they don’t have a timeline for when or if this feature will return”.
Two credible sources, two years apart, disagreeing about what a UK page can still do. Open your own dashboard and believe that instead. The pattern is the useful part: authors who had built a habit around one of those slots found out afterwards, with no say and no recourse. That’s the trade on a platform you don’t own, and it’s a fair trade as long as it isn’t holding up everything else.
It only does one job, in one shop
Author Central sells books on Amazon. It doesn’t take speaking enquiries, host a media kit, sell a course, run a workshop waitlist, or sell signed copies at a margin you keep. It won’t point a reader at Waterstones, Bookshop.org, your local indie or their library service. For a novelist, that may never bite. For a non-fiction author whose book is a lead magnet for a consultancy, it’s most of the problem.
Amazon Author Central vs an author website
| Amazon Author Central | Your own website | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | £199 build, £15/month care with us; other routes vary |
| Time to set up | About two hours | A day to a few weeks |
| Ranks for your name early on | Usually, on Amazon’s domain | Slowly, then reliably |
| Clickable links to anywhere | No | Yes |
| Email addresses you own | None | Every subscriber |
| Visitor analytics | Not in Amazon’s feature list | Full |
| Bio formatting | Plain text only | Anything you like |
| Sells non-Amazon products | No | Yes |
| Links to other retailers or libraries | No | Yes |
| Press or media kit | No | Yes |
| Survives a platform policy change | Not your call | Yes |
| Reaches readers mid-purchase | Yes, that’s the point | Rarely |
What an author website does that Author Central can’t
Amazon puts your book in front of buyers better than you ever will, with a checkout the reader is already signed into. A website earns its keep on the jobs Amazon can’t do at all.
Collecting email addresses. A reader who hands you an email address is reachable on launch day at no cost, on every future book, in every format, at every retailer. Everything else below is secondary to that one.
Controlling what your name means in search. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether “pages carry a byline, where one might be expected” and whether “bylines lead to further information about the author or authors involved”. Journalists, festival programmers, podcast bookers and prize administrators all look you up before they commit, and what they find should be a page you wrote rather than a marketplace listing plus whatever Goodreads decided.
Selling what Amazon doesn’t stock. Signed copies, workshops, consulting, a course, a bulk order for a corporate client. If the book exists to open doors, the door needs a handle.
Being the press kit. High-resolution covers, a headshot, a short bio and a long bio, review quotes, contact details. Every time somebody has to email you asking for those, you’ve lost a day and a bit of goodwill.
If you want the build detail rather than the argument, we’ve covered what an author website needs, what one should cost in the UK, and how to make it findable in search and AI answers.
Do you need a website yet, or is Author Central enough?
Three situations, and they don’t get the same answer.
One book out, no mailing list. Author Central, done properly, and nothing else yet. If you have £250 in the marketing budget, put it into the cover instead. A better cover moves sales on the page where people buy. A website moves nothing until somebody visits it, and nobody visits until you give them a reason to.
A second book coming, or a series. Build the site now, and build it around a signup box. Series authors get more from an email list than anyone else does, because they have something to announce, repeatedly, to people who finished book one and want to know when book two lands.
Non-fiction with a business attached. Here the order flips. The site is the business and the book is the advert, so the website is the priority rather than the afterthought, and Author Central becomes the shopfront window that points at it.
There is one thing a website does that Author Central never will, and that’s rot. A “Coming 2024” banner still up in 2026 does active damage in a way that having no site at all does not. A neglected website tells a festival programmer you gave up.
How to wire the two together
Amazon converts, the website compounds.
1. Get Author Central right first. Claim everything, write the bio, keep it current. Our setup guide covers the whole flow.
2. Buy a domain you can say out loud. Because the bio link isn’t clickable, the domain has to survive being remembered for ten seconds and retyped. Your name, no hyphens, nothing bolted on the end.
3. Put the domain in the bio and the book’s back matter, and mind Amazon’s link rules. Amazon’s Kindle hyperlink guidelines permit “Links to previous or subsequent books in a series” and “Links to additional ancillary material (e.g., checklists, assessment forms, craft patterns, and similar printable materials)”. They prohibit, verbatim, “Links to web forms that request customer information (e.g., email address, physical address or similar)”. So don’t send a Kindle reader straight at a signup form. Link to a normal page that happens to offer the signup once they arrive.
4. Give readers a reason to arrive. “Join my newsletter” converts badly. The deleted chapter, the character map, the recipe card, the worksheet from chapter nine converts well, and it sits comfortably inside Amazon’s “ancillary material” category.
5. Then improve the Amazon page itself. A+ Content is the one part of your detail page where you get real design control, inside Amazon’s rules. It can’t contain links out, but it can carry your series order, your credentials and your cover treatment on the page where the buying decision actually happens.
What we’d spend on first
Author Central first, because it costs two hours and no money. Then the cover, then the interior, then the Amazon detail page, then the website.
Our formatting starts at £69 for a print interior, and if Amazon turns it down on a formatting issue we fix it free. The website is £199 plus £15 a month, and it sits at the bottom of that list on purpose.
Before you spend anything at all, run the free KDP readiness audit. It tells you what’s wrong with the files you already have, which is usually cheaper to fix than anything else on this page.
Related guides
- Do authors need a website? — the yes/no version of this question, with the triggers that flip the answer
- Amazon Author Central UK: the complete setup guide
- What an author website actually needs
- What an author website should cost in the UK
- Author website SEO for AI discovery
- Selling direct from your website
- Newsletter platform comparison
Frequently asked questions
Is Amazon Author Central worth it?
Yes, and it’s a short conversation. It’s free, and without it you don’t have an author page at all: Amazon’s help pages state that one “does not come standard with use of KDP and you will need to register for an Author Central account to have one”. Two hours, no money, and it’s the page a reader lands on every time they click your name.
What’s the difference between Amazon Author Central and KDP?
KDP is where you manage the book: files, title, description, categories, price, royalties. Author Central is where you manage you, meaning the bio, the photo, the follower count and which editions attach to your name. The Author Page needs its own Author Central registration even if you already publish through KDP.
Can I put a link in my Amazon author bio?
You can type the URL, but nobody can click it. Kindlepreneur’s November 2025 guide puts it plainly: “Amazon doesn’t let you have direct hyperlinks in these bios, but you can still put them there, and people can copy/paste the urls into their browser to find you.” Bios are plain text only, so no bold, italics or HTML either. Which is the whole argument for a domain short enough to retype on a phone.
What does Amazon Author Central cost?
Nothing. Budget about two hours to set it up, assuming your books are already published and you’ve drafted the bio in advance. The real cost is writing two hundred words about yourself that don’t read like a CV.
Do traditionally published authors need Amazon Author Central?
Yes, and it’s usually the thing that gets skipped. Your publisher’s page for you belongs to the publisher and doesn’t outlive the contract. The Amazon author page is claimed by you. Claim it, write the bio in your own voice rather than lifting the jacket copy, and check that every edition is attached to it.
Will an author website make me sell more books on Amazon?
Not directly, and be suspicious of anyone who promises it will. What a website does is capture readers who found you somewhere else, then let you reach them again on your own terms. The sales effect shows up on your second and third launches, not in your first month.
Do I need separate Author Central accounts for Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com?
Yes, you register per marketplace, and Amazon lists six where the content is editable, including .co.uk and .com. Our setup guide covers keeping the two profiles in sync.
