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.
