We wanted a nice widget to show off our book content, and have now successfully created our first one using the book2look website (http://book2look.com).
It was pretty easy to do but we had a couple of false starts as we’d not quite got all the information together, and also hadn’t realized we needed to publicize the biblet before we could then go back and edit it.
Create a book2look site logon. We got ours through Nielsen (http://www.nielsenbookdata.co.uk).
Setup your company profile with website links etc.
Decide which of the shop links you want to appear and in what order before creating the biblet as, unless you want to publish it mid-construction, you need all the information ready to pop into the create screen:
- pdf of the interior as single pages plus jpg of the cover and/or the epub file
- the page numbers of the pages you want to include in look inside
- the title, author, categories, tags, and long description for the book
- short twitter text
- isbn and asin numbers
- and all the links to the shops you want to set up
- plus if you have them any video and audio files
- and links to any websites with reviews of the book
We have a few updates to do to it for review and for ebook files and links, but are quite pleased with how it looks so far.
Only disappointment is the widgets are created as iframes and we can’t directly include them on our WordPress website pages or posts, but we can include them on websites, or include them as hyperlinks on a screen shot which is nearly as good.
The widget includes social media buttons and also allows some reporting on usage and spread, which we hope to be interesting.
http://book2look.com/vBook.aspx?id=ZrFHGPVxgR
Slightly disappointed that the shop options don’t change by displayed country – but maybe that will come as it is an evolving biblet. A preview option would also have been nice as you don’t know what it looks like until you publish it, as would an option to change the displayed page numbers without restarting the process.
We’ll give this one a couple of days to bed in before we go ahead and build the next one.
Originally posed on our wordpress.com site on 27 June 2014.
We still use the Nielsen Book2Look widget for new books and to give the ‘look-inside’ option on websites, in print books and on promotion material. We’ve kept them upto date when covers have changed and to add new material for audiobooks and new videos. We have, though, removed all the shop links from them all though.
Look out for the regular promotions from Nielsen for blocks of Book2Look widgets at reduced prices.