Do You Want a Book Flipper for Your Website? (Free Trial Only)

***UPDATE***

With a free account on Publuu, your book flipper will only remain active for 14 days. After that, it will disappear. This may not be worth the trouble of creating one, after all, unless you choose to subscribe. 

The author website guru I've been following on YouTube has a really comprehensive article detailing the elements an author should include on his or her dedicated book page. Many of his suggestions directly correlate to SEO, and thus, though some may seem silly or needless, there is a method to his madness. 

I've also subscribed to his mailing list, and recently he touted embedding Amazon's book preview on one's site. Unfortunately, that advice is dated, because Amazon no longer offers that option. It does offer a link to a book's preview, but seriously, how many links is an author going to add? I'm looking to create an attractive page, not a link monster.

Thus, I went Googling for a free flipbook creator. 

I found one. A caveat is, it's only free one time, but thankfully I only needed it one time. The site is Publuu. While I haven't yet embedded mine, because I haven't yet created my book page, I did create a flipbook and copied the embed code. Thus, what I'm unable to do yet is vouch for its workability. However, Kindlepreneur does recommend it, and Kindlepreneur is right more often than it's wrong.

As with anything app-related, a user has questions that are not addressed on the site itself. My biggest one was size. If you've ever taken the time to create something, then found that when you placed it on your site it was itty-bitty, you understand the frustration. And enlarging it only makes it fuzzy. Publuu's default size is relatively small, so after creating mine (and not even thinking about size), I went searching for answers. Google's responses vary, but I went with one of its suggestions: 1200 x 1047. I now have two flippers of different sizes to try.

Naturally, now I read this:

Instead of fixing the size of the book flipper, consider implementing a responsive design approach. This allows the flipbook to dynamically adjust its dimensions to fit different screen sizes, including mobile devices, ensuring optimal viewing for all users. 

I don't recall if Publuu has a "responsiveness" option, and I can't go back and check (without purchasing a subscription), but if you try the app and the option is there, it's probably a good idea to choose it. 

One thing I do like about creating my own flipper and not relying on Amazon's preview, is that I can include as much or as little of my novel as I want. You do need to upload a PDF to Publuu in order to start the creation process, but that's easy enough. I went into my Word docx, copied as much of my manuscript as I wanted to include, and pasted that into a new doc, then saved it as a PDF. I also added my book cover. The conversion process was almost instantaneous. Then I clicked the "embed" button and got my code.

I've gotta say, I love free apps. If I was interested in creating flippers for more of my books, I would buy at least a one-month subscription to Publuu, because I like to support generous sites (as opposed to those you pay a fortune for, then find out they don't work. Looking at you, Atticus). By the way, Publuu's monthly subscription rate is very affordable.

A flipbook is but one more bell and whistle, but the more bells, the more attention your site will attract (hypothetically). As my website guru says, your goal should be to steer more people to your site, rather than Amazon's.