The New Job:
So New York was great, exhausting, bewildering but amazingly great. We got great support, twice that many ideas and launched in public beta in an interview Chris did with my friend and mentor MJ Rose. It was a neat merging of two halves of my life I’ve been trying get joined up for years.
Some specifics. At Book Expo last week–myself, Chris and our partner and CTO Adam Goldstein pulled the ripcord on BookTour.com, a web-based service enabling authors, readers and venues to connect up with one another for live events. We describe it thusly…
BookTour.com is a free online service that connects authors on tour and potential audiences of all sorts, from book lovers to professional groups. Authors create their own page (biography, books, our dates and availability) and any group looking for a speaker can find them and contact them directly to arrange for an appearance. We include fields for authors wishing to handle speaking engagements through their speaking agents and/or in-house publicity departments. Relevant author information can be added in minutes. Connecting authors with potential audiences is as simple as searching (by geography, book titles, subject, dates of availability) and sending an email.
My job is Chief Evangelist/Community Director which means I speak on behalf of our service, assure a smooth user experience and facilitate relationships with the publishing industry and future partners.
It’s a whole new way of living for me as I haven’t worked fulltime for anyone since these people over a decade ago. Also building something from scratch, even something as focused as this service, is a bit like designing a civilzation. There are few precedents. No one’s even laid the roads yet. You talk a lot about how your decisions will play out but fundamentally you can’t know for sure. You do a lot guessing, knowing you can always fix it should it not work. It’s its own kind of relief.
You can sign up right now to find out when your favorite author is coming to a town near you. And I’ll be posting about the gig here from time to time.
Reader interactions
4 Replies to “The New Job:”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
So m\now you are a kind of spokesman. isn’t it?
So m\now you are a kind of spokesman. isn’t it?
CONGRATS– that’s excellent!! Wish we’d had a chance to get together in New York but sounds as though things were a bit of a whirlwind (at least that was my BEA experience this year, as ever). Maybe next time you’re out here or I’m on the West Coast? At any rate, keep me in the loop; love what you’ve got cookin’
CONGRATS– that’s excellent!! Wish we’d had a chance to get together in New York but sounds as though things were a bit of a whirlwind (at least that was my BEA experience this year, as ever). Maybe next time you’re out here or I’m on the West Coast? At any rate, keep me in the loop; love what you’ve got cookin’