Authors and author pages

Authors are an ordinary WooCommerce product attribute. Once it’s set up, every book card shows the author’s name, each author has a “Books by …” page, searching for an author finds their books, and the homepage can feature an author with a biography.

Create the Author attribute

1. Go to Products → Attributes.
2. Add an attribute with the name Author and the slug book-author.
3. Tick Enable archives? so each author gets a page.
4. Click Add attribute.

The slug matters: Foliowick looks for book-author. (Developers can point it at another attribute; see Hooks and filters.)

Add authors to books

Edit a book → Product data → Attributes, add Author and choose or type the author’s name. A book can have several authors.

Author pages

Each author’s page lists their books under the title “Books by” and the author’s name, with the same filters as the rest of the shop. The author’s name on a book card links there.

Write a biography

Go to Products → Attributes → Author → Configure terms, edit an author and write their biography in Description. Authors with a biography can appear on the homepage:

• Meet the Author shows the author with the most books among those with a biography, with a bookplate monogram of their initials, the biography and their books.
• Our authors (used by the Independent press demo) lists authors with books and a biography, most books first.

Search by author

A shop search also matches author names, so searching “Calloway” finds every book by an author called Calloway.