BookTour Blog

New Products, New Relationship and Other Great News...

Dear friends,

We're really excited. We've got a bunch of stuff to tell you.

First, I’m thrilled to let you know that BookTour’s event data will now be displayed on Amazon Author Pages, a new program at Amazon.com. Amazon Author Pages are dedicated landing pages on Amazon.com where customers can find everything they could want to know about their favorite author all in one convenient place. Any event added to BookTour’s database  will now appear automatically on Amazon’s Author Page for that author.

Example: Check out author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's page.

See her tour dates on there? Pretty cool, eh?

A few things you may be wondering....

• Yes, our data will continue to be offered free to non-Amazon syndication partners. Which means that anyone who wants to can still display our event data on their website at no charge. It's as easy as visiting our widgets page and finding the widget that works best for your website.

• Yes, all books featured on BookTour may still be purchased through Barnes and Noble, Powells and a variety of independent bookstores via IndieBound.

• And yes, all events added to BookTour’s database, regardless of where they take place, will be displayed on the Amazon Author Pages. 

This new partnership is BookTour’s largest and will increase manyfold the exposure of an author’s event data once added to BookTour’s database. It will also mean a whole lot of attention for authors and books who may not always get the attention they deserve.

In cementing our partnership, Amazon acquired a minority stake in BookTour this spring.

Second big piece of news. We've launched two new services aimed at making the planning and publicizing of live events easier for our community.

• TourBuilder. Through TourBuilder, an author selects where and for how long they’d like to go on tour. Using BookTour’s database, TourBuilder will construct a suggested itinerary based appropriate venues for their location and genre of book. The intent? To remove guess work from book publicity and marketing and significantly streamline the process by with authors can meet their readers through live events.

•  EventMinion. A low-cost, hassle-free way of adding events to our database. For $1 an event, BookTour will take author tour data in any format and add it to our database. EventMinion is meant for the time strapped author, publicist or venue. User-adding of events is and will remain 100% free.

BookTour is moving in all sorts of exciting new directions but our goals have and will always remain to create the best possible source of information about and services for the author on tour and the readers who want to see them.

We can't thank you enough for coming along with us on this crazy ride. Stay tuned for more exicting developments in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, should you have questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to let us know.

Kevin, Adam, Chris and James. 

Twitter.com/book_tour

Spotted: Chris Anderson in Writer's Digest

This past week, Booktour received a warm hug from Writer's Digest in the form of this profile of our CEO Chris Anderson. Article's predominantly about his new book "Free" and what its implication for this crazy business of ours but the last half-dozen paragraphs are all about the happenings in this old oak tree.

We sigh in contentment and hug back. Thanks Writer's Digest!

Awww thanks, you.

The simply awesome Future Perfect Publishing blog, which covers new trends and dimensions in book publishing, had some real nice things to say about Booktour last week including...

Booktour.com is one of a new generation of online pubicity tools that simplifies the work of getting the word out about your book.  It aggregates all of your events, interviews, signings, etc. in one convenient place and makes it available to readers most likely to be interested in your book.  In doing so, it makes life a little easier for authors living at the narrow end of the long tail of book sales.

We're blushing.

Booktour and IndieBound. We're dating.

The three of us who founded BookTour were all authors before this here idea came to us. And anyone who publishes a book and goes on tour knows that there's no touring, no stops along that lonely road, no anything so pleasant as the warmly lit front window of one of our nation's great independent bookstores. They know you, they've probably read your book. There's probably a house cat with a name like "Melville". And cookies. Almost always cookies.

It was always our intention with BookTour to represent the breath of author-related events throughout the world. A major part of that task was events at neighborhood and homegrown bookstores. Except the trouble is neighborhood bookstores are all different (that's what makes them great). That made it hard to dump all their data into our hoppers in one go.

Until now. Thanks to some hard work and amiability on both our parts, Booktour is proud to announce a partnership with IndieBound, the nation's largest representative of independent booksellers. Now, throughout Booktour, events taking place at IndieBound-represented bookstores will be added automatically to our database. Equally important, on both author and venue pages, when an event is taking place at  an IndieBound-repped store, you'll have the option to purchase the book directly from that store.

This brings us a giant step closer to our mission of cataloging as many of the world's author events as we can in one simple, free-to-use place.

Excuse us while we gush.

California, Here we Are!

BookTour.com is based in San Francisco, California, which we've mentioned way too many times has the largest amount per capita book and alcohol purchasing in the nation. And even though that statistic makes our little barbary coastal seem like a giant drunken book club, we're proud to hold the title. Sure is a lot sexier than "most fire hydrants per square block" or "most projectile pumpkins per resident" although that last one's pretty cool, too.

Yes, We love being in California, which its great weather, better food and governor who used to pose in a speedo. So we're thrilled to announce today that our event data will now be syndicated at CaliforniaAuthors.com, the thoughtful chronicler of all things literary and left coast. Just click "event search" in their main navigation and get sent here. Then search by zip code, mileage and time. Take your pick.

CA's Kate Cohen made the whole thing way too dang easy for her users. And for us. California Authors also features a directory of authors based in the Golden State, libraries of west coast bookstores and publishers and a nice little collection of excerpts from books by California authors. 

So use it if this sort of thing interests you. We're just happy to be there.

Book tours suck! (unless you, ahem, use a certain service)

The Atlantic has an essay by author Ann Patchett about the lonely life of book touring. It's a lovely piece and well worth reading.

"...I covered about 25 cities and kept my expenses under $3,000. With one good dress in the trunk of my car, I would drive to Chicago, find the McDonald’s closest to the bookstore, change clothes in the bathroom (say what you will for the food, they have the cleanest bathrooms), go to the bookstore, and present myself to the person behind the counter. That has always been the hardest part for me, approaching the stranger at the cash register to say that I am the seven o’clock show. We would look at each other without a shred of hope and both understand that no one was coming...

"...A column in my local paper, The Tennessean, recently reminded me of that. The reporter remembered my appearance at a Book & Author Dinner in Nashville in 1992, during which I sat alone at a signing table while huge crowds assembled for the other authors, Ricky Van Shelton (a country-music heartthrob who had written a children’s book), Janet Dailey (a best-selling romance author), and Jimmy Buffett (no explanation needed). The editor of the paper felt so sorry for me that he quietly instructed 25 members of his staff to buy my book, stand in my line, and get my autograph, something I never knew had happened until I read it in the paper 15 years later. All those dutiful employees were later reimbursed for the price of a hardback."

From Gawker, which includes an even worse book tour horror story.

 

Feature Update 7/23/08

Over the past few weeks we've migrated our entire server setup to new web services (Amazon S3 and EC2). In general, you'll find the site to be much faster, although you shouldn't notice too much difference. That is, except for the new features and bug fixes we've made, including:
• You can now find authors who are based in your area right on the front page.
• The front page now loads all at once; sub-front pages are now entirely customized for their genre. Additionally, short descriptions accompany each feature on the front page.
• Venue search has been sped up, and now only shows venues with upcoming events.
• It's now possible to access venue pages without the "/show" section. For instance, http://booktour.com/places/show/13709-Sawyer-Free-Library and http://booktour.com/places/13709-Sawyer-Free-Library are identical.
• The boxes that float on top of faded-out BookTour pages (e.g. from clicking the More Stores link on an author's page) have been redone from scratch. Not only do they now work properly in Internet Explorer (finally!), but because there's no fade-out animation, they appear instantly.
• A bug that caused new author widgets to not display in Internet Explorer 6 has been fixed.
• A bug that caused a few authors' RSS feeds to return error pages has been fixed.
• A bug that caused custom widget pages to update incorrectly has been fixed.
• A bug that didn't redirect correctly to the custom search page has been fixed.
• A bug that broke iCalendar feeds has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented about 1% of users from seeing the front page has been fixed.
• A bug that made pins' shadows appear without the pins themselves on place search result pages has been fixed.
• A bug that briefly caused search results to fail has been fixed.
• A broken link on the master feature list page has been fixed.

Same Box, Better Results

You may have noticed that we've recently changed our search algorithm. We hope it's faster and, of course, a lot more accurate. We also added new sorting options so that you don't have to do too much digging.

The goal is to keep the road clear between you and what you're looking for, so if you get any wacky results or can't find something you know is there, send us an e-mail and we'll try to straighten things out.

Feature Update 7/5/08

The past few days have brought the following improvements:
• There have been substantial speedups to author and venue pages.
• A bug that caused some users to see an error page when they clicked the "More" link in the lower-right of the front page has been fixed.
• A bug that prevented about 0.5% of event pages from loading correctly has been fixed.
• A bug that caused a few disambiguation pages to be formatted incorrectly has been fixed.
• A bug that caused new-style author widgets to have a small gap between the last event and the bottom of the widget (when loaded in certain browsers and when there was only a small number of events in the widget) has been fixed.

Feature Update 7/2/08

New today:
• You no longer have to know HTML color codes to customize author widgets. On any author widget page, select Custom from the pop-up menu, and then click a text box to change the corresponding color.
• A bug that caused some people's browsers to crash (!) when loading the event-adding page has been fixed.