In the midst of chaos
23 April 2010
It has been a crazy few months. I swore I would write on a regular basis, but – as I mentioned in the last post – you must wear the rubber boots of reality or the industry will fry you. It’s true with small publishers and editors just as much as it’s true with writers.
We’ve grown substantially in the past few months, both in the number of authors whose works we have acquired (or “purchased”, depending on your viewpoint), and in the amount of publicity our company has received. Some of it has been amusing, and I’ll write about that another time, but let’s just say that we’re just too busy to worry about what others think of us at the moment. A word of caution to those with preconceived notions, however: Never assume.
Needless to say, we’re a little fried. Still, in the midst of chaos, the new routine is taking shape. It seems hard work and dedication does matter.
As we are going through myriad changes, our web skills have been put to the test! New ideas seem to appear on the horizon all the time, and some of them are quite good. Two that we’re in the process of initiating now are to create text hover-overs for our titles and authors, and build a connection with BookBuzzr, a platform for creating samples of books.
I have heard many times that BookBuzzr is a good tool, and many thanks go to its developer, Vikram Narayan. The construct of this tool is amazing. Not only do sample pages of your books appear on their fReado.com site, a widget is available for the publisher and the author to put on their websites. The user isn’t limited by a certain capacity for pages, such as Amazon’s “Look Inside”, or even Google’s Books samples. The author and/or the publisher determine the number of pages. BookBuzzr suggests the first 50 pages. For some of our books, this would be almost the entire book, so we’re going to make other determinations for some, but the capacity is essentially limitless. One could put their entire book into it and offer it free of charge without the need for a special reader or a particular Kindle or ePub platform.
For us, this is brilliant. We even added a page to our site for samples of our books, and as soon as we are done creating them, we’ll pass the widget information on to our authors who can then use them on their own pages or on their social media sites.
More information on Book Buzzr can be found on one of Tony Eldridge’s blogs from last year. BookBuzzr: How to Market Your Book on Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networks. Tony is great, by the way. Writers can learn a great deal from him.
See you soon.
