Ich bin ein Autor!

Is it worth creating Amazon author pages in other countries?

In my humble opinion, why not? What do you have to lose?

Bradley Charbonneau, the Author, exists in Germany.

My book is available on the Amazon store, but that means it goes beyond just the Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk stores.

It is just a question of cut and paste to create author pages for the other countries? Why not? What could be the downside?

Here’s the email I got from Amazon.

Even if there’s only a small chance that a German reader sees your book, clicks on your author page, and then and only then is so inspired by your work that she buys your book, why not?

What did it cost you in terms of time versus the potential payoff for your work? Here’s the empty list of what you can do for the German site:

I just copied and pasted the English section for the biography into the German one. No, I didn’t translate it into German. Since I’m not planning on translating most of my books into German, I’m going to keep things in English.

I do have a friend translating my “The Secret of Kite Hill” into German for me. Although he tells me it’s taking him a lot of time …

Good Practice

It’s also just plain good practice to work on your bio and update your photo, remind yourself of (the lack of!) videos you have to promote your book and get them all together for an Amazon site.

But what about …

I’m curious if I update, for example, the cover on Amazon.com will it be updated on the German site? I’ll try it out and see.

But I’m up and running in Germany! Watch out France, Japan, and the U.K.!

P.S. My German is good enough — as is my knowledge of German history — to know that I’m playing with John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in Berlin where he said, “Ik bin ein Berliner!” The joke about that statement is that, although he was trying — and succeeding — to create a bond with the German people, his grammar was just off.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning. — Mark Twain

So although Kennedy was trying to show that he was a part of the country, that he was not only German but that he was a citizen of Berlin, what he actually said was, “I am a jelly donut.”

The result of which was perhaps even better than if he said it correctly as it warmed the hearts of the Germans even more towards him and his innocent and funny mistake.