Let readers Tweet and Facebook from right inside your iBook!
We’re pleased to introduce a new widget called Share This that lets readers share content from your book. This could be anything from a PDF or photograph, to a paragraph of text or checklist. You specify what content you’d like them to share and which sharing options they can choose from – current options are email, Facebook, Twitter and Evernote, but many more will be added soon.
Not only is the Share This widget useful for readers, it’s also an effective way for authors to promote their book via social media. Every message that is shared from the book includes a hyper-link to a unique ‘link’ webpage for that book, which displays the asset to be shared, a book summary, plus links to the iBookstore. The following diagram illustrates how a reader would use the Share This widget to Tweet a picture from an iBook:
How to send a Tweet from an iBook with Bookry’s Share This widget
How we deal with signing in and out
When a reader wants to share something they will need to sign in to their social media accounts. This process is handled seamlessly by Reader Cloud (RC) so that it takes place within the iBook widget itself. A reader simply signs in to RC from any RC enabled widget in the book, to access the saving and sharing features – this will remain active until they sign out of RC. They’re then ready to share by email or Evernote. With Facebook and Twitter the process has one extra step as the reader will also need to verify their Facebook and Twitter accounts, as shown in the screenshot below. However they only do this once when using the widget for the first time, from then on, they only need to sign into RC.
Readers need to authorize Reader Cloud to connect with Twitter & Facebook but they only need to do this once.
So here’s a short summary of how to create a ‘Share This’ widget.
1. Create your widget
- In the ‘Static Settings’ – First upload your widget cover and widget background, then upload the asset you wish to share e.g. photo. Next, choose which sharing options you want readers to use.
- In the ‘Live Settings’ – Specify your widget title.
- Save the widget, download it to your Mac and then drag and drop the wdgt file into iBooks Author.
2. Customize your link page
- All ‘Share This’ widgets include a message and a hyper-link to a marketing webpage about your book. You create this page on Bookry.com and it will have a unique URL like this one: ‘http://show.io/3gbt’. Note: You can use this link for anything, not just with your Bookry widgets.
- To create your marketing webpage first go to your ‘Book Summary’ page and click on the ‘Link to your Book’ tab. Then select ‘Customize’ and fill in each section - you can update/change this at any time. The details you can enter are:
- Book header
- Summary text
- Link to your book website if you have one
- Font color
- Your default messages for email, Facebook, Twitter and Evernote
- Page layout – background, header and footer
- Add up to 5 links to book purchase locations e.g. iBookstore.
Upload the asset you want to share and specify the options for readers
And that’s it – you’re done! So now’s the time to have a think about what you’d like to share in your book, not only to please your readers, but also help you to spread the word about your book.
