Firstly, there are a number of birthday giveaway free tokens still available for In a Milk and Honeyed Land – but less than last week so if you would like one of these please contact me at books@kephrath.com. This is for the electronic version (epub or kindle mobi), sadly not for physical copies. I also had time to write a review of Britannia’s Wolf by Antoine Vanner, a piece of naval fiction set near the end of the 19th century.
But the main thing I wanted to talk about today was that, wearing one of my IT development hats, I have now finished work on a web (or blog) widget for authors. This screenshot shows the appearance, but for ‘live’ operation please look at the Matteh Publications site at http://mattehpublications.datascenesdev.com/AuthorWidgets.aspx or http://mattehpublications.datascenesdev.com/AuthorWidgetRegister.aspx.
What does the Author Web Widget do? Well, you can have a single widget which combines information from a whole multitude of different sources. It can be placed on your web site or blog – so long as the blog supports JavaScript, which is typically in the sidebars or banners rather than the main area. You can give the code – just a few simple lines to copy and paste, which connect to the Matteh Publications site for all the hard stuff – to your friends and supporters who can embed it on their own site in order to promote you.
The widget will link to your web site, blog, main social media sites and email. It will also allow you to combine a whole list of different vendor links – Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble and so on. You may well have reviews of the book scattered here and there – maybe Goodreads, Shelfari, and a whole lot of separate blogs. Same for extracts that you have contributed to various locations over the months. Since this widget is independent of each of these separate sites, you can connect to all of them in one place.
All of the details can be edited from a single page on the Matteh Publications web site – colour, size, text and link entries, vendors and so on. This page becomes accessible to you after registration. The edit process is pretty much automated and should be easy to manage, but if you run into problems I am just at the other end of an email – matteh@datascenesdev.com. At the moment the widget only lists a single book, but you can always have more than one and I can walk you through the simple process of hosting multiple widgets on a single web page if you like. From your page on the Matteh Publications site you can also see how much use your widget has had – how many page views, how many times someone has clicked through to one or other site, and so on.
How much does the widget cost? Well, the normal price would be £20 for a year’s subscription, to include unlimited edits and unlimited use on as many different sites or blogs as you wish. I am running an introductory offer of £10 for the first year for a limited time, probably a couple of months as the system is proved in action. The money transaction is handled by PayPal so your financial details wil be held securely at the PayPal site and not by me. All I need is the transaction ID to confirm payment.
If you’re interested in one of these web widgets for yourself, drop me an email at matteh@datascenesdev.com and we can talk about it.
But I have also been finding some of the down-sides with the new development tool (it’s the Corona SDK for the true IT geeks). This is based on a graphics engine called OpenGL – which is magnificent for things like displaying images and moving them round the screen, but really quite poor at laying out simple text in – say – some help pages. Ironically I think I have spent longer getting the in-app help to work properly than the mechanics of the game itself.
