Great news to report today: we've now partnered with the very cool GoodReads to bring book event information to hundreds of thousands of people. Our event data powers GoodReads new events feature, which is an exciting new step for both of us.
This move represents the beginning of BookTour's evolved strategy, which we call, uncreatively, "go where the people are." Although we're growing nicely, we're still small compared to the big book social networks. That's fine, because we're focused on one thing--events around authors--rather than trying to be yet another social network. But now it's even more fine, because our open APIs, RSS feeds and widgets allow BookTour listings to go wherever you want to be, from your own blog (copy our widget code to you pages) to any site that uses our data.
Authors should continue to use our site to create their tour listings and otherwise build their own pages, and people who are looking for events will find our own zip code search will always return the most listings and most comprehensive information. But if you never do more than encounter our data on another site while you were reading about a book or author, that's great, too. We're here to help authors find the biggest possible audiences for their personal appearances, and we'll go anywhere and everywhere to achieve that.
Our mission has always been two-fold.
Over the past year we've accomplished the first. Now, with our new distributed strategy, starting with GoodReads, we're going to make great strides towards the second.
Congrats to GoodReads for being our launchpad for this new strategy, and stay tuned for more!
Chris saw this cartoon in last week's Wall Street Journal. It's precisely why we founded this company.
No slag to the eBay buyers of the world but perhaps our new slogan should be "No more empty rooms!"
