Stand alone Mini-site

Status: Prototype
Method: Stand Alone website
Type: Author Website
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/int_minisite.php

The first widget solely on the new site, the minisite is a standalone website for Smashwords authors. It is designed for authors who need a quick website or URL to hand out.

• Purchase Links to third parties like Barnes and Noble.
• Social Networking integration
• Author and individual book pages

Because our host only permits family-friendly content, we may block any adult or explicit content. This also means this URL may be useful for people writing children's books, or non-fiction, as a way around the problem mentioned here and here.

With third party buylinks, the widget directs buyers to sites where they already have accounts, making it easier to purchase the books. These minisites will work for publishers, but are optimised for authors so third party links may have odd effects.

What is still being worked on?

• Adding Apple and Diesel links to the page. Both use a different API, making integration harder.
• Amazon and alternate format links. With Amazon adding more countries to Kindle their region-seperation makes things difficult.

To create or view a minisite, enter
http://www.smashingreads.com/author/Accountname
in the address bar of your browser.

You can see one running here:
http://www.smashingreads.com/author/ciamarprice

Book Button Widget

Status: Beta
Method: Image
Type: Book Button Static Display
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/buttons_bookbutton.php

A button generated for your books, showing the cover and, if it has a 4 or 5 star rating, that number of stars. It is available in dark blue or light-blue versions. It is generated on the fly so changes in the book's cover or rank should show up quickly.

As a dynamic image, the book button may be blocked on some sites (like invision). It can be saved locally and uploaded if you need to (right click on the image and choose "Save Image" or "Save As"). Obviously, this version of the image won't update. An example of an uploaded static image can be seen on the lensimage here.

There is now also a generator that allows you to add a link and your affiliate code around the image, giving you simple HTML to paste onto your site or webspage.

It is marked as in beta due to the white edging which shows up on some websites, and which we want to make transparent to preserve the curved edges. We are also working on improving its loading speed.

Embeddable store Update - Publisher version

Status: Alpha (re-version)
Method: Iframe
Type: Embeddable Store (Publisher)
Link: http://www.raggedangel.net/smashwords-tools/booksite/index.phpRemoved 21/02/2012. Please view current version

There is a now a second version of the Embeddable Store on the alpha page. While many of the features are still in development, this is now a tweaked version suitable for publishers.

The changes are purely cosmetic - exchanging "Author" for "Publisher" and rewording certains sections and links to hit a publisher's page not an author's - but it should work better than the existing one for publishers with multi-author accounts.

It still uses the author= parameter for the account name, even though it's actually accepting a publisher's account. This is to speed development, and let us implement revisions and fixes between the two versions more easily.

New Widget - Advanced Single Book Widget

Status: In Alpha
Method: Iframe
Type: Single Book detailed display
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/widget_advsinglebook.php

A more complex single book widget, meant for premium distribution users, which includes:

• A short description of the book
• A sample of the book (If the user offers more than 5 pages as a sample on Smashwords - if not a buy link shows)
• Buy links to various premium distribution locations
  as well as the standard cover, title, and author.

Price and Rating are not mentioned, as they may vary across retailers.

While there may be undiscovered bugs with this, it works for the books we've tested it on. It is in alpha because it can currently appear odd if the user resizes text in some browsers.

Search Box Widget

Status: In Beta
Method: Javascript
Type: Search box
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/widget_searchbox.php
Designed as a small widget for blogs or websites, to allow searches through an author's books, or general smashwords searches. Available in a basic Unskinned version, and a Skinned version.

Constraints: Only works where javascript is enabled. Special characters are stripped to prevent aggresive code reaching Smashwords, so search strings with hyphens or quotes in them may produce less accurate results.

Concerns: Future-proofing as Smashwords are updating their search in 2012.

Known issues:
Unskinned version: none.
Skinned version only - cosmetic issues: In areas where styles already exist the Javascript can appear odd as the styles are overwritten (See an example in this blog's sidebar). In the Blogger sidebar on firefox and opera, a 2px extra bit of background appears below the widget. This is cosmetic only and does not affect function.

Possible development: Add user's choice of referral link so that readers and reviewers as well as authors find it useful. Create iframe embeddable version.

Unskinned

Embeddable Bookstore

Status: In Alpha
Method: Iframes
Type: Pseudo bookstore
Link: http://www.smashingreads.com/int_embedstore.php

• Meant to be an embeddable "bookstore" (actually a link to external bookstores where the book can be found) for use with blogs and other user created sites.
• Designed to be expandable between 350 and 600 pixels, it can go beyond these limits but won't look so good.
• The third party links are currently "best guess" using the book data from Smashwords. As we cannot store data, this needs refining.

Our target was to lead the user from the featured books to the booklist to the author (and their social presence) to the bookstores. Each mention of a book brings up a page with the third party links to purchase that book.

Concerns: Special characters in user data, or tags, which may break the data feed.
Authors with over twenty books in the feed, where the system may slow (a cap is under consideration).

Constraints:
We can't store data, so this needs to be stand alone. This places a strict limit on how much customisation we can offer.
This is also why no referral links are embedded - there are too many third party merchants to handle them all.

As always any volunteers to test it, or general feedback, is useful.

 

About this widget

Currently Live at:
http://vhfolland.blogspot.com/p/bookstore.html