BookBuzzr: How to Market Your Book on Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networks

Recently, I came across an interesting way for authors to present their book on the internet and within social media sites. It intrigued me to the point that I contacted the creator, Vikram Narayan, and asked him to introduce his free book marketing product to my readers.

BookBuzzr is an application that allows authors to upload an excerpt, chapter or their whole book into a form that gives the readers a feel for reading a physical book, down from the page curls at the bottom when the reader turns the page. To help you visualize what this is, Vikram has included a copy of his article in the BookBuzzr format, which I have included at the end of this post. In fact, I uploaded chapter 1 my action/adventure novel and included it in the BookBuzzer format at the end of this post.

One other thing of note. I got even more excited about this application from a marketing standpoint when I asked them how the search engines deal with the text in BookBuzzr. Vikram's company responded that they are actively working on this issue as we speak. Now, I will turn it over to Vikram.

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How to Market Your Book on Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networks
By Vikram Narayan


Amazon, who pioneered offering samples on a large scale in 2003, reported a 9% increase of print sales across 120,000 titles in 5 days after the Search Inside capability was available on their site. Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales. Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality*. Think about the last time you bought a book. You bought it because of one of three factors:

1. You discovered it on a best-seller list such as the New York Times.
   
2. One of your trusted sources (such as a friend or relative) recommended it.
   
3. You were browsing in a book-store or online and stumbled-upon the book, flipped through a few pages of the book and decided to buy it.
   

As an author you don't entirely control if your book becomes a best-seller or not. But in this day of social media, you need to ask yourself if you're doing everything you can to get people to recommend your book to their friends and if you're enabling quick and easy sampling of your book. You may answer that you already have an author website which contains a book-cover image, your bio, details about your book and even a book-excerpt. But there are two problems with traditional author sites:

1. Most of the traffic goes to 'destination sites' such as Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo or the New York Times. So your author site may not receive the kind of traffic that you would want.
   
2. Even if a fan of your book comes to your site, it's not easy for her to easily share information about your book with her friends.
   

So what's the answer? How do you market your book in an era where the attention-spans of consumers measure a few micro-seconds? How do you tempt your potential readers to flip-through the pages of your book? How do you allow easy sharing of your book on networks such as Facebook, MySpace and other social networks? The answer lies in a little tool (or book-widget) that we've developed called BookBuzzr (available at www.freado.com.) BookBuzzr is more than just a replacement for your book-cover image. It's a portable author website that allows your book information and extract to be shared on Facebook, Blogs, MySpace and more. Putting up your book into BookBuzzr format is quite simple:

1. You upload your book-extract to fReado.com and it becomes available through BookBuzzr
   
2. Readers discover your book extract on your site, on blogs and on fReado.com
   
3. Readers share the book with others on blogs, social networks and forums
   

Apart from the easy share-ability, we've worked hard at making the pages of your book look and act like a real book. So when a reader clicks on the edge of the book, the page turns like a real book. Somehow, this seems to elicit a "wow!" from most people who try BookBuzzr. A number of authors have begun using BookBuzzr. Commenting on BookBuzzr, Chetan Dhruve, author of "Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator", says, "Books appear as static cover images on author websites.

In contrast, BookBuzzr makes a book look like a real book and allows readers to turn pages like they would in a real book. And BookBuzzr does this on the author's site, blog or Facebook profile!" We've received plenty of positive feedback from authors who have uploaded their product into BookBuzzr format. Give BookBuzzr a try. It's free and it can only help you in marketing your book in this Web 2.0 world.

* Sparking an e-book revolution – http://tinyurl.com/cedzem

-- Tony Here: To give you an idea of what BookBuzzr is, I have released my action/adventure novel, The Samson Effect, in the BookBuzzr format. I hope you enjoy it.
Tony Eldridge