You might have noticed a new box on the left hand side of the blog right under the name and what the blog is about. Right above the box it says Becoming... and in the left top corner, it says BookBuzzr. There's also a bright yellow/orange box that says "Read Free Sample" which I hope you will click on and read. It's an interesting display of my latest release, Becoming...
I'm not pitching the book at this point (though I might add that you can order it via my website for FREE SHIPPING through February 9th). I want to focus on that little box and the "look inside" feature that it offers. If you've read any of my blog or converse with me in the world of FaceBook or Twitter, then you know I've been throwing myself into learning about marketing and social marketing in particular. One of my Twitter connections led me to the website BookBuzzr.com. I was skeptical because of this one simple word: FREE. Now that word shouldn't scare a person but we all know free usually isn't. Just like with my free shipping, you still have to buy the book to get the free shipping. I guess I could ship you an empty box and then the shipping really would be free though it wouldn't serve either of us very well and I don't want to do that so don't ask me to. Still, I was intrigued by what I saw in my hopping around on the BookBuzzr.com site and I'd like to briefly share that experience with you (Brief from me? Yeah, right!).
According to the The Story page of the BookBuzzr.com site, that little box is an (and this is a direct quote) "embeddable book-widget that's shareable across multiple social networks. And with book-pages that look and act like pages from a real book." I personally liked the widget and decided to try it out on Becoming... although I'm truly thinking toward the marketing end of A Marriage of Necessity and how it will look as a widget :) Anyway, I decided to give it a test run. It was actually fairly easy to use. Of course, being a self-published author and doing my own formatting and POD publishing submissions, I have direct access to my pdf files. The site does, however, give you a link to an easy pdf converter. I may try it even though I don't have to since OpenOffice has a one-click converter for the inside of the books and I already discussed in a previous post how I use PhotoShop to convert my covers to pdf.
The upload was simple. They do ask some questions along the way that go toward building your profile. All pretty simple. I liked the fact that I got to pick the pages that went into the widget and did not have to choose pages that were all right together. They also provide you with a marketing checklist and suggest that you follow at least some of the listed suggestions to create a base level of presence on the Internet. I've done a few though not all.
All-in-all I'm intrigued by this little tool they call a book-widget. I'm going to create them for the other books I've written as well as for a couple I've published for others and we'll see where we go with it. In the meantime, make sure you click on that "Read Free Sample". At the very least, it will automatically post something about my book on Twitter :)
No comments:
Post a Comment