This week we commented on Fileby the new venture to list and promote authors. It would be remise not to also mention other initiatives of a similar vein.
The UK’s Countrybookshop has always had a high internet profile and it has a strong record of pushing the book market boundaries with their work in supporting authors and festivals. They have now launched Booksconnect
Booksconnect.com, is attempting to do what so many have tried before to do and connect the dots between writers and readers within an online network. It supports all the expected features for published authors including adding and updating their profiles, blogs and articles and book extracts, reading guides, news and discussions. Authors can also promote their unpublished works to the book community which involves editors, agents, publicists, publishers, librarians, booksellers and readers and in doing so support a new an interesting form of dating agency.
Unlike ill constructed ventures such as Book Rabbit these both appear to have many of the expected boxes ticked but will and why will either succeed and in fact how would either measure success?
We welcome these new initiatives along with the many others we don’t hear about. The challenge is to create the glue that effectively binds all the various interests together from the author to the reader. Perhaps that may be a challenge too far in that the physical and digital worlds are so different in their respective value chains. Yesterday information about authors was so scarce it was truly valued and sought. Today we are one click away from an author’s web site, their blog, their facebook page, their myspace page, their you tube video, their iTunes podcast, online reviews of their books, the publisher’s web site, their Wikipedia page, etc.
We now have an information omnivore in Google geared up to be a bookseller.
The question we find ourselves asking is - where’s the money?
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