Building a books library that does the work for you

Here's the smallest, most-overlooked feature that pays back the fastest: the books library.

You paste an Amazon link, and every post you write about that book from now on has the cover, blurb, and series info one click away. That's it. And yet most authors don't set up their library on day one and pay for it every week after.

What the books library does

Open /dashboard/books. Click "Add book." Paste an Amazon URL or ASIN (the 10-character code in the URL, like B0BX1234PP).

Thirty seconds later, you have:

• Cover art — full-resolution, cleaned up
• Title, subtitle, and series name (if it's in a series)
• The back-cover blurb — verbatim from Amazon
• Categories and keywords — the BISAC subjects and any keywords the listing declares
• Publication date, ISBN, page count — the metadata authors usually scramble to find

All of it stored in your account, tied to your current pen name, and queryable from anywhere else in the tool.

Why that matters for posts

Go to /dashboard/compose and start a new post. Below the caption field there's a "book" dropdown. Pick any book from your library, and:

• The book's cover is attached as the post image automatically
• A reference to the book (title, optional series info) is prepared for the caption (you can use or not)
• Links to the book can be shortened to storylink.to/your-book-slug with one click

What used to be "go find the cover file on my computer, resize it, drag it into the post, type the blurb from memory, find the Amazon link, shorten it" becomes "pick the book from the dropdown."

Where the library really earns its keep

Three places the library has a multiplier effect:

Campaigns. When you ask AI to draft a 30-day launch campaign, it pulls from your books library. It knows the series, the keywords, the blurb. The captions reference real details — actual character names, actual stakes, actual tropes — because AI read the blurb, not a made-up summary.

Templates. The Cover Reveal, Book Announcement, Available Now, and Blurb Excerpt templates all pre-fill from your books library. Pick a template, pick a book, and the draft is 80% done.

Cross-promotion. If you're running a backlist reactivation campaign across your whole series, the library is the list. You select which books, and every post has the right cover, right blurb, right Amazon link, right shortened URL — without you managing any of that by hand.

The 60-second setup

1. Go to /dashboard/books
2. For each book you've published, paste its Amazon URL
3. Let each one import (takes ~20–30 seconds)
4. Done

For a six-book backlist, that's ten minutes of paste-and-wait. For a series launch, do it once when you finish editing — before you start planning the social campaign — and the library is already populated by the time you open Compose.

Pen names have separate libraries

Important: each pen name has its own books library. If you have a romance pen name and a thriller pen name, you'll set up each library separately. Which is a feature, not a pain — your thriller books shouldn't be selectable when you're writing a post as your romance pen name.

When you add a pen name, its library starts empty. Switch to that pen name in the top-right dropdown, then add the relevant books.

What gets stored vs. what's pulled live

The cover art and metadata are stored in your account, so posts render correctly even if the Amazon listing changes. But you can refresh a book anytime (open it in the library, click Refresh), which pulls the latest metadata. Useful when:

• You updated the blurb on Amazon
• You added a new series book and want to update the series order
• The cover was just redone

What it doesn't do

• It doesn't pull sales data. (Amazon doesn't expose that to public scrapers; KDP's own dashboard is where sales live.)
• It doesn't sync with Goodreads, Draft2Digital, Ingram, or your other retailers. Just Amazon for now, because Amazon has the richest public metadata. (If you publish direct-only or exclusively on a different retailer and need a different source, email [email protected] — we've got a workaround.)
• It doesn't publish your book or manage your actual listing. That lives in KDP or your distributor. This is purely metadata for social posts.

What to do next

• If you haven't added any books yet, go do it now. Five minutes of setup, months of payoff.
• Once the library is populated, try a post template to see the multiplier effect — a Cover Reveal template + a book from the library = a draft in 30 seconds.
• If you're running multiple pen names, make sure each pen name's library is separate.