Easy Steps to Write a Book with WordPress CMS

The award winning WordPress CMS is one of my favourite scripts i have used because we can customize it in many ways by making wordpress to build a Static website, Blogging script, Shopping portal, Support website to a online book based on your customizations. WordPress security is very good and you dont have to fear about anything once wordpress based website is up because it can easily handle high server resource usage problems.

Steps to Write a Book Using WordPress :

1. The First and Foremost step would be to create a static page and set it as homepage of your blog because this is the page where you can show up the main introduction of the book and design a book cover
2. Setup Chronological order and maximum posts per page for category page templates because you need to show the categories as index of chapters and the chapters in the earliest to latest order.
3. Use the following code above or below the posts[chapters] in order to show the Next & Previous chapters linked automatically, which can make the book reader easily navigate from one chapter to another easily without the need to search.
   <div class=”alignleft”><?php previous_post_link(‘&laquo; %link’) ?></div>
   <div class=”alignright”><?php next_post_link(‘%link &raquo;’) ?></div>
4. Install a Print Plugin for wordpress because it comes handy when some of your book readers are interested in getting a hard copy of your book and read it offline.
5. Install a share posts plugin for wordpress which allows your readers to send the chapters via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and other social bookmarking sites.
6. Remove Comments Template from single post because there is no point in getting comments from your readers for individual chapters, you can have a feedback page with comments enabled if you need feedbacks. Just search for this code in your singlepost.php pages <?php comments_template(); ?> and remove from the post page in order to remove the comments section.
7. Remove All the other Post data like Post Published Date, Post Author etc because you need to make the look of your single posts, wordpress posts and index page look like a static site though the backend would be dynamic and there would be no point in showing up these post data.
8. Make a habit of using bullets, small paragraphs in the posts[chapters] because this would make the chapters look neat and would help the reader read all the sections easily navigating para by para and understanding things easily.
9. Make sure you interlink the posts if possible by referring to other chapters and also add a live link at the end of each chapter because it would help if someone copies your content and you can gain backlinks from it.
10. Avoid using Dark Background colour for your theme and try to use a white coloured background with text colour being #000000[Black] or #666666. This would make the reader read the content without any pain and easily complete reading all the chapters in one go without any eye pain because of stress in reading from darker background sites.
11. Link to a online pdf conversion tool from each post or offer a download link to complete PDF version of your book in the form of a eBook which your readers can read in a later period.
12. Final Step would be to have a detailed about/profile page which is linked from every chapter either in the header or footer section because this way you can self brand yourself and make sure readers recognize you by your name and next time they can recommend others about your book or resources by Quoting : ‘Read this How to Guide by Amit Bhawani, it just rocks!’
13. Try to avoid sidebars, sidebar widgets or any other link structure in your blog because this may confuse your readers and make break the chapters reading flow and lead them to nowhere.
14. Setup a Optional ‘Index of Chapters’ page using a wordpress sitemap plugin and show all the chapters in a excellent bulletized format which the readers may bookmark and make sure you add a link to this page in the header section for easy access.
15. Setup a email drop box where the readers can enter their emails and you can generate a mailing list where you can send some new updates or releases of your next upcoming ebook. Mailing lists are always useful for generating traffic or continious revenue.

If you have any other doubts on how to write a book or a ebook using wordpress CMS, feel free to ask me and i will help you out.