You can see on the right hand side how Buy This Book Extended looks from the front. The image to the left is what the back end looks like. It’s very simple, though it’s not entirely reliable, at least on my computer, when it comes to saving information. But the basics of the process is that you upload the information about the books–cover, blurb, series, buy links, book page, etc.–only once, and then after that you simply copy something called a short code–one line of code that will display your book in various permutations, with or without blurb, in rows or columns. And, if you need to change some information about the book, you only need to change it in one place, and it changes everywhere in the site.

The best part about it, especially for those of us with small and mid-sized presses, is that you can personalize all the icons for the buy links. In the other two plugins that I found, you had to pay for that functionality, but this one is free. The person coding this plugin is an author herself, so she’s very open to helping out and implementing requests in the code.

This version is in beta, so there’s lots of changing of functionality, and debugging of script. But, if you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can search her original plugin, which is much more stable, but not as flexible.