WordPress Plugins and Some New WhatCulture Articles

One of the things I like a lot about WordPress are all the plugins it has. It can really help to enhance a site. Besides having my own webspace that I paid for (as opposed to using the limited free services on WordPress.com), I took it a step further and also bought the Magazine Premium theme, which has been wonderful.

One plugin I’ve been struggling to find is something that will easily display all my different books. If you use the navigation bar to find my titles, you’ll see I’ve got them split into different series. For the most part, I do this with the use of categories and make the pages as simple WordPress entries.

It’s far from being the ideal set-up. Quite far, actually. There are a few different plugins that allow me to display my books, information about them, and buy links to them, and I thought I’d talk about some of these today.

First up is Buy This Book. It provides buy links for Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Lulu, iBooks, and one custom option. Books are displayed with just the cover and if you click on the cover, a slide-out menu with the buy buttons will appear. It’s got support for the major sites, plus a custom one. The downside, however, is that it’s just a widget for sidebars. Not as helpful if you want to provide more information about your books.

Next is MyBooks for Authors. This takes it a step up from Buy This Book. The sites it supports are Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, 800 CEO READ (a site for business books), IndieBound, Books-A-Million, and also iTunes and Audible if your book’s available in audio format. The buttons are displayed nicely beneath the cover and everything is aligned well. There’s also a sidebar widget that can be set up to slide through different books. Not bad so far. But there’s no support for some of the other things I’d like, such as being able to connect books in a series.

Third is Totally Booked. This one actually shows the most promise of all four (we’ll get to the fourth one in a moment). They provide links for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, and…ChristianBook. Support for a niche market like ChristianBook without support for iTunes and Kobo, two of the big four online booksellers, is definitely a bit strange, but whatever. There’s one buy button and when you click it, a pop-up window appears with all the various sites you can buy the book from. That definitely cuts down on clutter. And there’s support for genres and series with links at the bottom where you find links for other books in the series, other books by the same author, and other books in the same genre. The problem here is that there’s no differentiation. For example, Tales of the Rook isn’t a book I wrote by myself, I just wrote one story. So if I clicked the more by this author, which author would it list? Me? Barry Reese? Bobby Nash? Tommy Hancock? And what about multiple genres? Chasing The Dragon is partly a horror book, but it’s also a crime novel. And a thriller. If I clicked the “find more books in this genre,” which genre would it list? Also, there’s a major problem with theme integration, in that it doesn’t work with my theme. Fortunately, the developers have said they plan to address the theme support in the next release and are also going to look at the other suggestions. If those things are addressed, this may be the one to go with.

And finally is MyBookTable. This is a relatively new one and seemed to show the most promise at first. For one, their layout is the best of all of them. They’ve also got support for series, multiple authors, and multiple genres, all of which are individually-clickable links. So far, so good. But the only link you get with them is Amazon. If you want more, you have to pay for the pro version, which is $49. The pro version is also required if you want to use Amazon’s affiliate system (if you want to sell your books directly with a PayPal button, that requires a developer version ($99). So they want you to pay $49 before you get the links that are provided by other plugins, that’s a definite turn-off. But the final nail in the coffin is theme integration. They only support the free WordPress themes and select other themes (all of which are paid). Support for the plugin also requires a paid version.

At the moment, it looks like Totally Booked is going to come out as the winner. They seem the most dedicated to providing a product that can work for as many authors as possible, regardless of how much money you give them.

Anyway, on the WhatCulture front, I’ve got four new articles for you to check out, if you haven’t yet:

5 Reasons Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk Should Get His Own Movie

10 Irresistible Quentin Tarantino Spin-Offs That Definitely Deserve To Be Made

8 Changes That Would Have Completely Fixed Batman Forever

6 Worst Ever Comic Book TV Shows

UPDATE: Since I posted this piece, MyBookTable came out with an update to their app. it can now integrate with my theme without problems and they’ve also added Barnes & Noble links to the free version. For now it’s the one I’m going with, but Totally Booked could still impress me.