Add Series Details to Book Pages on Your Website

Introduction

Providing clear series details on your book pages is essential for enhancing reader engagement and improving your website’s organisation. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to create custom fields that showcase a book’s position within a series and the total number of books published. These fields help readers navigate your series effortlessly, while also boosting SEO by enabling search engines to identify structured series data. Whether your series is ongoing or complete, this step adds professionalism and functionality to your author website.

When we come to the module to build the Books Custom Post type template it will automatically hide the Series Name elements if no details are added.

Book Number Custom Field

From the WordPress admin side bar lets go back to ACF > Field Groups

• Edit the Books Field Group

General Settings

• Add a field
• Set the field type to number

• I’ll call this field ‘Book Number’
• We will accept the default field name

Validation Settings

Not all books are part of a series so I won’t make this field required and there are no other settings to configure in the validation section.

Presentation

I’ll add an instruction in the presentation tab.

• Which book number in the series is this title?

Then I’ll click save changes

Total Books in Series Custom Field

We’ve got the custom field for which book number this title is in the series now to add the Total Books in Series custom field to let the visitor know how many books are in this series.

General Settings

• Add a new field
• Set the type to NUMBER
• Enter Total Books in Series for the field label
• Accept the default field name

The only other change is to add an instruction under the presentation tab.

• How many PUBLISHED books are there in the series?
• Save changes

Update the Book Post

I’ll go back to the Adventure Danger book post, add the extra information and save the Draft.

• I’ll set the book number to 1 as this is the first book in the series
• I’ll set the total books in the series to 6

I don’t need to add a custom field for the series name as we will pick that up from the Series Name taxonomy we created earlier.

Summary

This lesson demonstrated how to add custom fields for book series details, including the book number and the total books in the series. These fields enhance the reader experience by providing clear information about a book’s placement within a series and its overall scope. Additionally, structured series data improves your website’s SEO, making it easier for search engines and readers to find and engage with your content. By implementing these fields, you’ve taken another step towards creating an organised and professional author website.