If you have anything to sell, or previous publications to tell people about, you’ll want at least one page listing those, with “buy links”. In the “one hour” setup, this is done with Mooberry Book Manager.
You could also create your own book pages and book list or grid, using columns as shown above. This makes sense if you don’t have a lot of books.
There are other book catalog plugins. I’ve evaluated those, and one theme that provides this ability. Here’s the lowdown on the bibliography landscape.
- Mooberry Book Manager by Mooberry Dreams, you’ve seen already. It’s free, and you get all the affiliate revenue from sales made through it. I don’t like that there’s just a book grid, and no option to include a little summary text with the cover and title (the developer says this is coming).
- MyBookTable Bookstore by Author Media works well, but unless you pay $49 for the premium version, your affiliate revenue for Amazon and Barnes & Noble goes to the plugin developer rather than to you. Some other nice features are also available only in the pay version.
I also evaluated Totally Booked by Ben Casey and Genesis Author Pro by copyblogger, but neither of these was worth describing in detail. I wrote reviews of them on the wordpress.org site.
A little more detail about the top contenders follows.
Table of Contents
MyBookTable Plugin
MyBookTable, in its configuration options, lets you select which page of your website will display your book list. The entries are displayed in a single column with the cover image on the left and a blurb you’ve entered on the right, above whatever buy buttons you’ve entered links for.
This plugin also adds a control to the classic editor to insert a book grid anywhere using a shortcode. This can show all the books, one book, or a subset such as all the books of a series. This is good for inserting a book advertisement into the middle of your posts.
You can drag and drop to control the order in which books appear in the list.
The paid version also gives you some formatting options for the book list. For instance, to display a grid of covers rather than a list. Here’s a list of features in the different editions.
On narrow screens, the cover image gets smaller, and the list drops into a single-column format.
You also get a widget to insert a book into the sidebar or other widget area. This lets you display a random book, recent ones, or one you select.
Clicking the widget, or on an entry in the books page, takes you to the individual book page.
The excessive indentation on the left is specific to Twenty Sixteen theme. Try it on your site, with your theme; if it doesn’t look right, read MyBookTable Book Page Margins for corrective measures.
If you choose, the plugin links the book page with the Amazon “Look Inside” feature.
Also if you choose, the plugin offers to “Find a Local Bookstore,” which (some claim) is good encouragement for physical bookstores to carry your books. I don’t know whether there’s any merit to this. However, their search shows all bookstores nearby, not only those that carry your books. Why reward stores with free advertising if they’re not doing anything for you?
Instead, if your books are in few enough retail shops that it’s convenient to do so, create a page listing them. A plugin such as WP Store Locator by Tijmen Smit is a good choice for this — it lets you create a list of locations and displays both the list, and a map search for which are nearby. It doesn’t search for all stores, just shows the ones you entered.
Mooberry Book Manager Plugin
The Mooberry Book Manager plugin doesn’t display a blurb in its book list; instead there’s just a grid of covers and titles, which are links to the individual book pages. That’s not optimal, because a cover alone often isn’t enough to tempt people to click through. The developer has promised blurb-ability in a future version.
(Alternately, you can use Mooberry for its single-book pages, and use the columns feature described earlier to create your own book tables. But that’s a lot of work if you have many books.)
Like MyBookTable, Mooberry has an option to display a single book in the sidebar. This widget also shows only the cover. You can select a specific book, or have it choose different ones at random.
All the options for buying the books are on the individual book pages. You can’t buy directly from the book list or widget as you can with MyBookTable.
You enter the URLs to go with the buy buttons, and these can include your affiliate codes, so more money comes to you.
The plugin supports any number of retailers. It comes with many already defined, including the graphics for their buy buttons, and you can add more.
If your book has a Kindle edition, you can use Amazon’s Look Inside feature on your book page to let people read an excerpt. You can also just enter an excerpt on the page.
There’s no tie-in to Amazon reviews or Goodreads reviews. Instead, you can manually add reviews from anywhere, which I think is preferable, since it lets you choose which reviews to highlight rather than letting Amazon choose for you.
Generally speaking, I don’t think the fancy extras are needed. Linking to other pages about the book on Goodreads or wherever, is enough.
For books in a series, specify the series name and also the series order, which is used to sort the books in a grid. To create a new series, type the series name, then click Add.
The field to specify the book’s position in the series is under the heading Book Details. Yes, it would make more sense for it to be under Series.
If you choose to list the publisher, you have to set up the list of publishers in the Mooberry Book Manager Settings screen of the dashboard.
Paid add-ons include the following:
Mooberry Retail Links Redirect
This extension makes it easier to include a link at the end of your ebook to the retailer’s page for that book, so readers can leave a review if so inclined.
The free plugin Redirection by John Godley can also do this. Doing it the Mooberry way saves you the trouble of setting up the links separately, since it triggers automatically based on the buy link you enter on the book page.
However, I disagree with the idea of sending the reader to someone else’s page. If you can get them to click a link while they’re in a good mood (having just finished your excellent book), it’s better to bring them to your site instead, as I describe in my article on Post-Read Pages. There, you can ask them not just for a review but also suggest they buy your other books, follow you on social media, etc. Plus, you can use your site statistics to track how many people click your last-page link.
Mooberry Multi-Author
This plugin lets you enter an author name for each book and have separate pages for each author. This is handy if you write under multiple names, or if the site is for a group of writers.
This ability is included in the free version of MyBookTable.
Mooberry Advanced Widgets
This gives more control over the sidebar widget that displays a random/selected book. It includes the ability to select from among “most popular” books, or books with same tags matching the post they’re displayed with, to select whether to display some additional text, and to modify the layout.
Mooberry Additional Images
You know how when you browse products online, there are often multiple pictures of the product as little thumbnails from different angles or whatever? If you want to do that with your books, this plugin is for you. It also adds a special location on the form for a book trailer video.
There are places on the form already to enter formatted text, images, and video. Without paying extra money, you can use these to insert additional pictures and trailers. But those pictures don’t work like the product thumbnails, which are kind of slick.