Book Pages

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I decided to make a couple of changes to my website, mainly regarding my Books page. I realized that, in the last couple of years since the site was set up, I’ve written quite a few more books (six? Seven?)  I had all of my titles on one page, by series. But at the NINC conference I attended in October (still trying to implement what I learned there), Jane Friedman recommended a separate page for each title. A lot of Jane’s tips are in her post “The Basic Components of an Author Website.” The page of books that I had created was ungainly, cluttered, and disorganized. Having a separate book page for each title definitely made sense to me.

I decided to have drop-down menus from my books tab with each series dropping out (I know my terminology is awful, sorry—no formal education in tech, just a degree in messing around).  I designed a page for each series with a series description and the books listed in order.  From the series page tab, tabs for each individual book from that series dropped out from that menu.  Here’s a screenshot:

On WordPress, there is a handy menu page where you can stagger menus and menus within menus (sub-items, they’re apparently called) to see the organization or structure of your site.  Dashboard-Appearance-Menus.  I created pages for each book, found the page I’d created in the column to the left of the menu structure, selected it via the check box, and clicked “add to menu.” It usually added it to the bottom of the menu and then I dragged and dropped it where I wanted it to go. More help from WordPress is here and here. There is also a YouTube video that may help.

Now for the tough part. Actually creating the book pages. I had 19 books to do and not a lot of time.  So…I did decide to do some investigating into software to make the process easier for me. If you don’t have a lot of books, you could easily handle this.

I looked for a plug-in that would help me out on WordPress.  I found MyBookTable and started reading the reviews to see if it would be a good resource. I was familiar with AuthorMedia because I’ve frequently shared their blog posts.  Reading the reviews for the plug-in, I found that some people were unhappy because, to use our own affiliate links, we must pay for the plug-in.  But when I checked on the price (with some trepidation, since these were some strong complaints), I found that the upgraded version was $49.  For me, this was a no-brainer. I will write the $49 off on my taxes. I suspect, if AuthorMedia puts the fact that an upgrade of $49 is needed to input affiliate links on the plug-in page, the fact that there are no surprises will take away any complaints.  A closer look at pricing here.  I didn’t do the developer upgrade, since I’ve only got the one site.

So I plugged in the different values for list price, sale price, publication year, a sample chapter (I didn’t have time to put all of them in, but that’s on my list of things to do), blurb, and links to my books on various retailers. They returned a nice-looking page (an example here)  with buy links. And I had to do no design wrangling whatsoever.

One cool thing I could do with this plug-in was on my series pages.  With one click of the “insert shortcode” button (at the top of my page next to “add media” on WordPress), I could insert all the books for that series and their buy buttons. You can see it in action on my Myrtle Clover series page.

I also added a printable list of my books for readers on all my series pages.

I have links to print copies of my books as well as any audio versions.

There are still some additional things I want to do farther down the road, but this was a good start.

Have you taken a look at your book page lately? What kinds of things do you list on it?

Setting up book pages on our website:
Click To Tweet

 

The post Book Pages appeared first on Elizabeth Spann Craig.