Amazon

Author Central

Amazon Author Central aims to support self-published authors gain a new understanding of how their books are performing combined with rich insights about their readership, and then put this information to use to help them reach the right readers, grow their audience, and sell more books. So they can get back to doing what they love: writing.

Team

Kindle Content Design, Author Experience

Role + Responsibilities

UX Strategy

Interaction and Visual Design

Overview

Author Central - the legacy books management portal for authors who create, publish, and market on the Kindle platform - had its last major overhaul in 2009 and as a result, was no longer capable of properly supporting the authors well. It was missing major services authors wanted, and what services remained, including managing author and books properties on Amazon were hard to use or had limited functions.

Research

Kindle conducted extensive qualitative research from authors across the country to gather sentiment on the extant hub, and desired capabilities they’d want to see in a reimagined one. Goodreads’ annual author conference allowed us to conduct mini design sprints that provided directionality for features, as well as interviews that guided or validated some of our designs.

While the hub and spoke model legacy Author Central was useful, authors signaled that they wanted more capability using one system, particularly with management of core author services such as their author profiles, books pages, marketing and event calendar, as well as seamless integration of the most important part of their business: sales data.

Opportunities + Challenges

The legacy hub was quite outdated and difficult to use due to the fractured experience. Authors were actually creating programs to collate sales data from discrete sources to get the full picture of their business that Author Central should have been doing for them.

We had the opportunity to create an experience that was seamless and comprehensive, but delightfully easy to use as well. But to do this was a gargantuan effort to reimagine, overhaul, and deploy a system that was relied on by thousands of authors who depended on this system to manage their livelihood. And gathering disparate pieces of data in one central place for authors to consume proved quite the challenge.

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