Claire Ryan's Blog, page 16

Cunable by the Numbers

Much has been made of a new service called Cunable. Here’s their description, in their own words:

Calling it self-retailing, Cunable allows all authors, those with or without an existing publishing relationship, to sell from their personal websites. By removing the barriers from retail distribution, Cunable eliminates the retailer channel and strengthens an author’s relationship with their fans, and vice-versa.

Details on the site itself are rather thin on the ground, but we have a bit more from Kevin J. Anderson’s blog.

A Point by Point List

Here’s what I have been able to determine.

Cunable isn’t actually allowing an author to sell from their site, regardless of what they say above. Kevin’s books are set up on store.cunable.com, not www.kjablog.com, and there is no brand matching going on so it’s obviously not the same site.
Cunable sets up the sales page for the book, not the author.
Cunable sells an ebook. 70% goes to the publisher, 30% to Cunable, who then splits that 30% with the author. This will net the author an extra 15% of the sales price in royalties. This will vary, presumably, and we don’t have solid numbers on the split yet.
Cunable wil provide sales data on titles sold through their service.
To date, we have no info on what’s required for signing up, how payments are handled, how often the royalties are paid to the author, etc etc. But the Cunable Terms and Conditions for customers are human readable, and this bodes well at least.
We don’t know how well the downloaded ebooks work on various different devices, nor if DRM is included or excluded.

I guess I’m being rather pedantic about the whole ‘selling from the author’s site’ thing, but accuracy is important to me. In order to make this claim, I would expect Cunable to integrate into an author’s site, for example – or at the very least, open up in an iframe on an author’s site.

This is not necessarily a black mark against them. It’s the web developer in me talking.

What You Should Know

This is a new service. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, and a lot of questions I’d like answered.

First of all: this doesn’t look like a scam. It’s novel, but legit. It actually looks like an interesting idea, if anything – it suggests that Cunable will act like a basic version of Amazon that adds on to an author’s site (though I’m still hoping for some kind of full integration).

Secondly: it’s got a lot of potential, if they add a number of what I would consider to be essential features.

Brand matching to the author’s site
Read inside function
Amazon API access to pull reviews and ratings for individual books
Links to other books by the same author/in the same series on each book page

I figure most of this is in the works already.

So here’s what it looks like to me right now: it’s a turnkey ecommerce solution for traditionally published authors. Will it be appropriate for self-published authors? I honestly don’t know, but I suspect not at this point. The indies tend to be all about control, and Cunable currently doesn’t offer much control.

If they develop this platform, and if the stats they provide are more detailed than Amazon’s, then I fully expect this to become a standard on every author’s site. It’s a good idea, and a good business model. It’s just not very well developed at this point in time.

I’m going to be watching this one, and I recommend you do too. Give John Grace (the guy behind the idea) a while to work on it, and we might see something pretty special in six months.

Related ArticlesThe Danger of New ServicesBeware of Author SolutionsThe Author as CustomerThe Brave New WorldSo You Just Want to Write

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What You Need to Know about Book Piracy

Okay, we all know about this. Piracy, the great and terrifying force that’s destroying authors’ means to make a living on one hand, and getting their work in front of thousands of new readers on the other. There’s plenty of conflicting information out there.

Let’s get down to business, shall we? Here’s what you need to know, my dear author friends, in a handy bullet point list.

1. Piracy is not something that can be stopped.

This is because of the limits of technology. Sorry, guys. It’s not possible to stop piracy completely through technological means. If there was a way to do it, the big media companies would have found it by now, seeing as they’ve spent the last ten plus years throwing millions of dollars at the problem.

Now, having said that, let me elaborate a little. It’s possible for you to prevent your work from being pirated if you never publish it and keep it on your hard drive or in your notebooks forever. I’m assuming, though, that you intend to actually publish your work, or you’re already published.

So here’s the best analogy: imagine your book is in a box. You have the key to this box. In order for someone to read your book, you must give them the key so that they can open it, or you must open it for them – but as soon as that box is open, they can infinitely copy your book, whether you like it or not.

I guess you don’t want them to infinitely copy your book, because you won’t get paid for any of that. But that’s the trade-off, unfortunately. If someone can read your book, they can copy it.

2. Piracy can be reduced, however.

You can, in fact, cut the rate of piracy. You know what’s working for the big media companies, whether they like it or not?

Netflix, and iTunes.

Think about it. What do these things have in common? They make it really, really, REALLY easy for a user to access the content. Netflix is a monthly fee, all you can eat option; iTunes is a one-click buy. This is what you want to aim for, when you’re selling your books. Piracy takes time and effort that plenty of readers just don’t have, but they’ll do it if they feel they have to. If you want to sell your book and restrict it to the US, for example, you better accept that it’ll be pirated outside the US by fans who don’t want to wait around for their local release. If you make your book inconvenient to read for some users, say by adding DRM, then they’re likely to pirate it to get a copy that ‘just works’.

Case in point: the Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling was famously against any kind of ebook release of her work because she feared they would be pirated, and, as a result, there was no legitimate way to buy Harry Potter in electronic format for years.

Did this stop piracy? Hell no. Pirate versions were the ONLY ebooks available, they were intensely popular, and Ms. Rowling didn’t see a dime because the fans who so wanted those ebooks had no way of paying her for them. So, long story short, make it easy for people to buy and read your books, and they’re less likely to go and pirate them.

3. It’s sometimes good, and sometimes bad.

For most authors, piracy is less important than obscurity. If there’s one thing that piracy is good at, it’s getting content into the hands of lots of people through very efficient methods. Musicians, filmmakers, etc, have the same problem with obscurity, and plenty of them are willing to use piracy to get publicity.

For the big guys, piracy means they’re losing some unknown number of sales from people who opted for the free copy instead of paying for it.

4. But the bad has never really been quantified.

If you step back from the usual emotional response – ‘OH NOES THEY’RE GETTING MY BOOK FOR FREE AND NOT GIVING ME MONEY!’ – and look at piracy from a purely business perspective, no one’s ever really been able to prove conclusively to what extent sales are affected by piracy. The big issue is that there’s no correlation. Game of Thrones, for example, is one of the most popular shows around at the moment, and it’s the current title holder of ‘Most Pirated Show on TV’. It’s also a massive commercial success, so it’s not as if piracy appears to be harming it that much.

See, if piracy was such a huge deal, then we’d a very particular pattern – commercial failures among movies and TV shows would be far more likely to be heavily pirated than normal, and commercial successes would be far more likely to be less pirated than normal. Fact is, we don’t see that pattern.

So what does this mean for you, the author? Well, it means you should keep a cool head and don’t worry about your books being pirated until you know for sure that piracy is influencing your sales.

5. It means your work is popular and people like it.

If your books are being pirated, then they’ve got something good going for them. Nobody shares stuff they don’t like. Don’t forget that the users doing the sharing are usually your biggest fans, too. You think they’d bother chasing after your books if they didn’t really want them?

Popularity is awesome. That’s step one in the big game of ‘How can I make huge piles of cash from my writing?’ Your next step is figuring out why your fans are pirating your books, and seeing if there’s anything you can do to make it easier for them to give you money, but getting popular is the hard part. I think a lot of authors forget this.

6. People have lots of reasons for pirating.

It’s not always about the money. When it comes to ebooks, it’s really not about the money. Everyone can afford a few bucks for a book. The denizens of the Internet are used to getting their content instantly and conveniently, to the device of their choice, in the format of their choice. Take away some part of this, and they’ll resort to technical means to get it back.

To go back to Games of Thrones on this: Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal pretty much gets it right. Some pirates can’t afford to buy, sure, but a huge bunch more are simply not given the option to start with, because of licensing or regional restrictions or who knows what else. Some can afford it, but don’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on a new device to watch one show or read one book. Some can afford it, but don’t want to spend their cash on something that could turn out to be terrible so they try it before they buy. Some can afford a few books, but their budget doesn’t allow for new authors who may or may not be worth reading.

Some don’t have credit cards, and Amazon doesn’t take Paypal, so they may not be able to buy your books if they’re only on Amazon.

See what I mean? You can call every pirate a degenerate and immoral cheapskate if you wish, but that’s not really accurate.

7. Fighting piracy is a HUGE sink on money and time.

I have to point to the majors on this one. The MPAA and the RIAA (the licensing bodies for Hollywood and the big music companies) have sunk millions of dollars and years – repeat YEARS – into combating piracy. They’ve taken just about every avenue open to them and their enormous wallets, up to and including suing the individual pirates in mass lawsuits. They have almost nothing to show for their efforts bar a few high profile cases against infringers who will never be able to pay the fines.

That’s kind of the problem, really. The amount of time and effort you have to put in to fight piracy on any level (again, a problem that might not even be a problem) is astronomical. It’s also pretty emotionally draining, and who wants to deal with that when you could be writing?

8. It’s not theft.

Semantics, okay? But it matters in legal terms. Most piracy is a minor civil crime, if anything, and it’s counted as infringement. Theft involves depriving someone else of their property, and when a book or movie or whatnot is copied, the original stays with its owner. Plenty of people like to talk about theft when it comes to piracy, and those people are plain wrong. It’s an emotional argument designed to stir people up about it.

No, it’s not theft of a sale either. A hypothetical transaction doesn’t count as property.

9. Everyone commits some level of piracy every day.

Okay, so piracy is copyright infringement. These days, copyright is so narrowly defined that just about anything a person does with a media file is infringement.

Let’s say a reader buys your ebook. If they do the following with it, is it piracy?

Make a backup copy
Convert it into another format to read on another device
Quote a few paragraphs in a blog post

Answer: yes to all of them. They’re all copyright infringement. Any time someone makes a copy that doesn’t fall under fair use, it’s technically infringement. It certainly doesn’t stop with books, of course. And most people don’t think about it at all.

In closing

Having read extensively about piracy over the last few years, here are my final thoughts on this:

Piracy isn’t something that can be reduced down to a few snappy sound bites. It’s a highly complex social phenomenon, and describing it in black and white terms isn’t useful. Whether it’s bad is debatable, and whether it’s good is hard to quantify, but fighting against it is probably not worth your time. The best strategy, if indeed it’s possible to have a strategy at all with regard to piracy, is to ignore it.

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The post What You Need to Know about Book Piracy appeared first on The Raynfall Agency.

Quick hit: New Top Level Domains

Looks like Amazon is going after the .author domain.

A top level domain is the stuff you see at the end of a website link – like .com, .co.uk, .org. ICANN, the ones in charge of this kind of thing, are allowing companies to apply for new TLDs, and there’s something of a rush on them right now. I’m glad Amazon is getting this, though still wary. Mostly I’m just happy that AuthorHouse or any of the big publishers aren’t getting it.

Here’s a few others:

.book – Bowker is one applicant, plus a few others I don’t recognise.
.docs – Google and Microsoft are going head to head over this one.
.free – Amazon and Google both asking for it.

No one’s applied for .writer yet. I wonder if there’s an opportunity there?

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Career Control

Sometimes, I read about a particular aspect of the traditional publishing world, and I ask myself one question: would this kind of thing fly in any other industry?

Most of the time, the answer is no.

So here’s a post from Rachelle Gardner that asks another, rather more difficult question. Will my publisher let me self-publish too? What it means is whether a traditional publishing contract allows for self-publication of other works while the author has sold another work to a traditional publishing house. Allow me to quote from the first part:

If you are contracted with a traditional publisher, you may have restrictions on your ability to self-publish “on the side.” And this is not because publishers are overly possessive, or “dinosaurs,” or “just don’t get it.” It’s because they have an investment to protect, and it’s their responsibility to ensure nothing you do will interfere with the saleability of the brand they’re building (you).

Allow me to make my own position on this clear by saying that this is unimaginably, irrevocably ridiculous, and my level of respect for Ms. Gardner has fallen a little at the thought that she supports the inclusion of non-compete clauses. She lays out a number of considerations that publishers must consider when looking at this phenomenon, of authors who self-publish ‘on the side’, and it’s some of the most infantilizing idiocy I’ve encountered yet, to the point where I cannot let it lie.

The problem is that anyone, even publishers, are asking this question. This is a stupid question.

Anyway. Let’s dive in and be controversial.

Branding issues

So a publisher bought a manuscript, and they want to position it in a particular way in the marketplace. They don’t want branding interference. Well, tough luck – they didn’t buy a brand, and authors are not regular employees of the publishing houses. If a freelancer produces a widget to sell to one company, for example, people would rightly laugh their lungs out at the notion of that freelancer being restricted in selling a similar widget to another company because the first company has branding concerns.

Once again, they didn’t buy a whole brand. They bought one damn manuscript for a few thousand dollars. If they want control over a whole brand, well, they should be paying a hell of a lot more for it.

Quality Issues

Publishers spend considerable money on several rounds of editing, copyediting, and typesetting. They also have expensive, experienced designers for your cover as well as the interior design of the book.

Well, this is nice and all, but once again – who cares? They might be concerned that a lower quality self-published work reflects badly on the manuscript they bought, but frankly, their concerns don’t mean anything when they didn’t buy control over the author’s other works. They want that control? Then they can pay for it, by hiring the author as a regular employee. There are all kinds of sensible rules about contracting vs. fulltime employment, after all.

Time Issues

So the publisher is worried that the author isn’t going to be spending all their time on the manuscript that’s covered under the contract. At this point, I just have to throw my hands up and ask who the hell are they kidding? Why did they sign a contract with this author if they’re afraid the author can’t deliver?

This sounds a lot like the publishers being self-centered. I hate being a broken record, but seriously – did the publishers pay for all the author’s time? No. They paid for one manuscript. Authors are not regular employees. They can do whatever the hell they want with their time as long as they produce the goods according to the contract they signed. Unless and until the publisher pays authors a regular wage, with specified hours, they don’t get a say.

Promotional Issues

If they allow you to self-publish, they may lose their right to set boundaries on what you’re allowed to do promotionally, and this can be disastrous. What if you are working with a self-pub company who wants to put two of your books on a special “free” promotion… the same week your publisher is doing a big launch for your latest front-list release? Readers may be exposed to both promotions and choose the “free” books over your new release. You have just undercut your own sales.

Emphasis mine. This actually made me irrationally angry. The author hasn’t undercut their own sales – they undercut the publisher’s sales, and that’s debatable at best. The author gets more exposure out of it, which is a good thing, as we all know that free promotions boost sales of other books by the same author.

In Summary

Rachelle points out that this is all about competition, and let’s be honest – it is. Publishers want control so that they can reduce competition for their product, the manuscript they’ve bought. Most businesses would like this. I bet they’d also like the moon on a plate as well, and maybe a unicorn.

Here are the problems with all this:

They’re not paying for it.
It’s unethical in the extreme, to the point where a similar non-compete clause in a regular work contract would not be enforceable.
They’re not paying for it.
THEY’RE NOT PAYING FOR IT.

That’s really all there is to it. Publishers are completely insane if they think that authors should give up their ability to make a living elsewhere with other manuscripts, devote all their time to a single contracted work, and only do promotions with their permission, all for only a few thousand dollars. This isn’t to say that they can’t ever do that – they certainly could, but there’s a word for people over whom a company can expect that level of control, and they’re called EMPLOYEES.

And this is why it enrages me so much: publishers can only get away with this kind of crap because they used to be the only way an author could get published. Having a monopoly is a good method of making sure that you can dictate any terms you like, no matter how onerous they are, to your business partners, as well as paying them a pittance for their services. And make no mistake about it – authors are business partners in this respect. Publishers are going to have to wake up to the fact that they don’t have a monopoly any more, and this kind of clause is unacceptable if they’re going to continue paying very little, comparatively speaking, for an author’s work.

So here’s the final note from Rachelle’s article:

As I said up above, we are in an age of experimentation. Publishers have a lot to lose in terms of investment, so it behooves them to move cautiously when trying new things. But take heart—most of them are trying new things!

You know what? Nobody gives a damn if they have a lot to lose. If they can’t run a business, then they deserve to fail and get out of the way of companies who have a clue. Publishers seem to think that picking up an author’s book is doing them a favor, something they should be grateful for. The reality is that authors don’t owe them jack shit, and they sure as hell don’t owe them any patience when they include crap like this in their contracts. So, again, who cares? They can try new things. They can move as slowly as they want. They can dictate anything they like to their own employees, but the instant they try to do the same to outside business people, they should be rightly treated with the contempt they deserve.

(Note: I’ve mentioned the ethical considerations, and it’s worth reading up on non-compete clauses in other industries, but long story short: such clauses that shut down someone’s ability to earn a living are flat out unenforceable in most places, and with good reason. That’s all I have to say about it.)

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The DRM Endgame – What Authors Can Learn From Video Games

Ah, video games. They’re a wonderful procrastination tool for authors who like to switch off their brain a while. They are also a source of some very interesting technical developments, particularly in DRM – and hoo boy, did we ever get a doozy of a case study to pore over recently.

In Short

Sim City is a long-running franchise built by Maxis and distributed by EA Games. They released their latest iteration of it, Sim City 5, not so long ago, with an always-on internet connection requirement where the players’ games were saved on the EA servers. This was to encourage social gaming, trade between players, all that other silly networking stuff… or at least that was the official line. Everyone who was paying attention knew it was to stop online piracy of their game.

It’s DRM of the nastiest kind.

The Debacle of Sim City

Oh, the mistakes. So many mistakes.

To start with, the Sim City servers were hideously unreliable and completely overloaded on launch. The always-on requirement for end users also meant an (in theory) always-on server requirement for EA, and they stuffed it up pretty well. There were reports of some players unable to play the game they had paid for for up to a week.

The game had its own flaws. It’s entirely possible for a player base to get over the internet connection requirement if the game is actually good, but Sim City 5 fell short of the mark on its own.

EA argued that its always-online requirement was due to all the processing that their servers had to do – only to have their claims blown out of the water by a few intrepid technological wonders who proved that Sim City 5 would run offline. So, it wasn’t for the players that they made it online only.

Maxis have apologised with the usual stuff that boils down to this: lots of people like this extra level of annoyance; building a standalone game wasn’t consistent with our ‘vision’; we don’t care about the fans who have literally been screaming for a standalone mode of gameplay.

The Lessons for Authors

Folks, any time you hear a business professional say that building a product that people are clamouring for isn’t part of their ‘vision’, run away. Far, far away. This is pretty much an admission that they’re not interested in making money.

I want to talk about this because this is the end game of fighting piracy, my author friends. This is how far the rabbit hole goes if you concentrate on nothing but stomping on the filthy pirates and not actually listening to your customers. Consider if an author tried this in order to stop people from pirating their work – can you imagine a book that requires you to be online and connected to a server, if you want to read it? And that server constantly crashes or becomes overloaded, so the book will not even open?

How many books would you sell if word got around that no one could even read the first page?

Fighting against piracy is a fool’s game for just this reason. It’s a total waste of money, especially when your real business starts to suffer as a result. Even the mindset of ‘stop pirates at all costs!’ is plain poisonous, if this is what results from it. My advice, as always, to any indie authors remains the same: ignore piracy, and leave DRM off your books. Concentrate on writing more and connecting with your readers, your real fans, and keeping them happy.

If you take any lesson away from the ruin of Sim City 5, let it be this: DRM will never and can never work.

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Buy This Book Plugin updated

In response to a few feature requests, I’ve updated Buy This Book to include an alt tag for the main cover image, and an extra custom option for your own choice of service.

Anyone still on version 1.2 doesn’t need to update, as this is just a few additional features added in.

 

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The Dangers of Bad Contracts

So, it’s been a while. Life does get in the way of blogging, doesn’t it? Still, I’m back to being somewhat stable again, and so, I must return to writing on a somewhat regular basis.

This brings me to the recent ridiculousness surrounding the Hydra contract. For those of you not yet up to speed, here’s the play by play from John Scalzi and others:

Random House’s new Hydra imprint has hilariously bad terms.
This lead to the SFWA declaring that Hydra would not count for membership.
Random House responds with the usual big corporation damage control.
John gets a copy of the contract from Alibi (Hydra’s sibling imprint, presumably uses the same terms), and breaks it down – you MUST read this.
More on why these are absolutely insane.

Long story short… do you remember when Penguin bought the open sewer that is AuthorHouse last year? Here’s what I said then…

It’s about the way that Author Solutions makes money, by selling overpriced packages. This is the same reason why I think that there will be no significant changes to the business, as some people hope. Why would Penguin bother to tinker with a machine that already makes money? The changes that they would have to implement, as many people hope, to clean up ASI’s reputation will be large. If they were going to do that, it would have been easier and less onerous to just build a new division with a clean slate.

And we’ve been proven right. Penguin merged with Random House, and, surprise surprise, Random House launches its own AuthorHouse clones that seem designed to suck money out of authors in desperate need of validation.

The Contract

John’s already gone through why it’s an absolutely horrible contract for authors. It goes without saying that anyone with even a smidgeon of sense should avoid it like the plague. I’d like to go through it from a pure business standpoint. This is a transaction, between the author and the publisher, as John says – so what are each party getting out of it? Let’s think about it a little differently. What if the author is a contracted designer, and the publisher is a manufacturer?

No Advance. The manufacturer would normally pay for the design, and here it does not. The manufacturer gets access to the product (the book) without paying up front. The designer initially gets nothing.

Exclusive worldwide rights to do anything with the product in any format and any language. Until seventy years after the designer’s death, no less. So, the designer cannot sell the product design to anyone else to manufacture, in any other country, in any other form, or in any other language.

Each party gets an equal share of the profits, AFTER the manufacturer’s costs are covered. The designer’s costs are not covered. John does a better job of explaining this, but what it amounts to is that the manufacturer can sell the product, and all its costs – including marketing, possible legal costs, production costs of print versions, everything and the kitchen sink – are paid before any payments are made to the designer. The designer’s hourly costs, and they would be extensive, considering how long it takes to write a marketable book, are ignored.

It’s Hollywood accounting, if anything, because the manufacturer seems to be able to charge a range of costs which are not explained – as Writer Beware noted.

The designer gets one copy of the product in one format. The designer presumably has to pay for more copies in other formats. So, if the designer wants to sell a quantity of the product (because they want to make money, obviously), they have to pay the manufacturer’s price. There’s no selling on consignment, presumably.

The manufacturer gets all rights to just about everything to do with the product, in the present and the future, and they must be the ones to license it – if they choose to. The designer effectively loses all control over the product once they sign this contract.

When the designer creates another product, the manufacturer has the option of grabbing that product too at the same terms. The designer is limited in whether they can sell another product to other manufacturers.

If the manufacturer decides not to continue production (the out-of-print clause), the designer can possibly get the rights back – or maybe not. It’s not made clear at all. In the case of ebooks for example, does an ebook listing on Amazon count? If a digital copy CAN be bought somewhere, is it still considered to be in production even though the manufacturer does nothing?

In Summary

This contract is completely nuts. It’s so unimaginably one-sided that I’m ashamed a company the size of Random House ever conceived of it to begin with. To quote John Scalzi again:

THIS IS A HORRIBLE AWFUL TERRIBLE APPALLING DISGUSTING CONTRACT WHICH IS BAD AND NO WRITER SHOULD SIGN IT EVER.

That’s pretty much it. The contract takes all control from one business partner and gives it to the other in exchange for nothing. Normally arrangements of this kind involve a large payment in exchange for control, in fact. That this one doesn’t pretty much says everything you need to know about how Random House views the authors that make its business possible.

This contract does not treat authors like business partners in a joint venture. It treats them like commodities. It tarnishes Random House’s reputation if nothing else, and certainly ensures that I will not consider any kind of business relationship with them. It begs the question: if this is how they really view their partners, why would anyone want to be in business with them?

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Hello there!

Hi to everyone who’s visiting from Joel’s Book Designer blog!

If you’d like to take a look at the Buy This Book plugin, check out this page here.

If you’ve any suggestions for functionality or comments, please email me at info@raynfall.com, or leave a note on this post.

I’m making my marketing book for authors free on Smashwords today for you guys, so go grab a copy using this promo code:

KR82P

It’s valid up until the end of December and it’s good for any number of copies. Go nuts.

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Buy This Book Update

I’ve updated the Buy This Book WordPress plugin to the latest version, and I’m also planning on making a version that can be used on a free WordPress site – some technical knowledge involved, but better than nothing, I hope.

I’ve made some security fixes and code updates in this version – mostly stuff I should have done on release, but that I didn’t get to for various reasons. You can still use version 1.0, but I recommend updating it obviously.

Please note that the update will remove your links. You’ll need to add them again. Sorry about this, it’s a side effect of the security and modification stuff.

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Buy This Book WordPress Plugin

It’s been quite a while since I got started on the concept of this, but the WordPress plugin I’ve posted about before is now ready and available for download.

I created this to combat three problems:

Many authors use things like the Amazon Affiliate widget to display their books, which is stripped out of webpages by adblockers. This results in their books never being seen by a significant chunk of users, as adblockers are the most popular plugins for Chrome and Firefox.
If authors want to just add their books and a link to Amazon, etc, they’re obliged to know some HTML and it’s something of a pain in the ass.
Neither option is ideal when books can be available on multiple websites.

Clearly, there’s a technical solution to this, and I put it together in a WordPress plugin called Buy This Book.

The Plugin

What it does is relatively simple – it takes the process of adding books to a WordPress sidebar and makes it painless. Here’s an example from Perry Wilson’s site (many thanks to her for being my eternal guinea pig!).

What you can see here is that every instance of the widget takes up to three books. How many you want to add really depends on you, but Perry has hers split up by series, so she has four. Within each widget, you have to add the image and links for each book, and on the front end…

There’s her sidebar, with the different widgets being displayed. You can click on any image, and a small menu slides out under the book with icons for different buying options. Perry uses three of the six, and the widget currently supports the following:

Amazon
Kobo
Barnes & Noble
Smashwords
Lulu
iBooks

Obviously, the ones you don’t use won’t show up.

Credit

I want to give credit where it’s due – initially, I planned to adapt the Buy This Book widget provided by the Ted Weinstein Literary agency here. I found that I preferred a slideout menu to a popup, and their widget only supported services that use ISBNs in the URL – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Indiebound. Still, many thanks to them for giving me the idea and the push to get this done.

I hope this is useful to all who use it. I’ll be submitting it to the WordPress directory as well as offering it for download here.

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