Barbara Jaques

WordPress theme for self-publishing author

THE BRIEF

Barbara needed a website to showcase her novels and short stories.

Having recently deciding to self-publish her books, she also needed someone to convert her books from Word documents into eBooks.

Barbara wanted readers to be able to read samples of the books on the website and also wanted to encourage readers to keep in touch so that she could let them know when her next book was published.

Barbara also needed advice about ISBN numbers, how to publish eBooks to online bookstores such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and iBooks etc.

The aim was to get the site up and running before Christmas 2015.

WHAT I DID

I built a bespoke WordPress theme for Barbara. The site has a user-friendly dashboard so that Barbara can add new bookstores to the site as well as links to her books as and when they are published. There is also an email signup form so that readers can join a mailing list to let them know when new books become available for download.

I first converted Barbara’s books from Word format to HTML. These HTML versions also included tables of content as well as links to Barbara’s mailing list, website and other books.

The HTML book versions were then converted to MOBI format required for the Kindle on Amazon site and to EPUB format needed for Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks and other publishers. I also created Word versions acceptable for Smashwords, a distributor to many different bookstores, that has very strict rules on how the Word documents are to be formatted so that they can create their own eBook versions.

Barbara is a talented illustrator and had a lot of input into the design of the site.

A graphic designer created Barbara’s logo and eye catching book covers.

The books and website were published on 10th December 2015.