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August 2008

August 13, 2008

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.



August 11, 2008

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.