Bookhitch: A way for the little guy to promo books—and open-minded readers to discover them
Who says a book- or author-oriented site is enough for good visibility on Google and other search engines? Suppose, at no cost, you could also get your book listed in a search engine that’s used not only by other small fry but also by some majors such as Random House.
You might check out Bookhitch, which is offering the basic service for free and charging $20 for a premium version showing your book cover.
For readers, Bookhitch might also be a place to browse for titles not easily discovered elsewhere—in areas ranging from kids’ books to military ones. I haven’t read The Splendid Five: A True Story about the Splinter Fleet during World War II, one of the listings in the latter category, but Wesley Hall’s book intrigued the editor of Kilroy Was Here, along with others.
Started in May 2006, Bookhitch includes 3,000 publishers and authors, with close to 100,000 books listed (I don’t know how many would be E).
“We get an average of 25,000 visitors to Bookhitch a month, with over 1.2 million hits to the site in 2007,” says the site’s marketing director, Emma Ward.
Bookhitch is also into other activities, including a forthcoming community-written book, the use of RFID tags and QR codes (in this case, ways for bar codes to include meta data, related URLs and other details about books). Also check out the site’s newsletter, including interviews with an iRex staffer and the also one with the founder of National Novel Writing Month.
Ahead I’ll reproduce info Emma provided.
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About bookhitch
· Launched in May 2006
· 3,000 publishers and authors listed close to 100,000 books
· We help connect authors, publishers and readers · bookhitch is unique in that publishers and authors control content of listings. They can manage all of the information that appears on bookhitch and where they want to direct readers.
· We get an average of 25,000 visitors to bookhitch a month, with over 1.2 million hits to the site in 2007.
· We have a wide variety of books including e-books, audio books, and paperbacks.
· Over 80 genres and 400 sub genres to choose from. About our book listings
· Basic listings are free and include key information about a book (title, ISBN etc) as well as a 60 word description, 5 keywords, 2 genre listings and a link to direct interested individuals.
· Premium listings cost $19.95 and last for one year. They include everything a free listing has as well as a picture of the book, double the description length, search priority (on exact matches), and a web page to showcase the book with an author biography and book reviews. The major search engines also pick up this page. Over 98% of our premium listings receive click-thrus.
About the Community Book Project
* We devised the community book project to give every writer the opportunity to have his or her name in print. The book was a collaborative effort by many individuals to take one chapter, and continue the story line fluidly. Community members voted each chapter into the book, and then the writing process would continue with numerous writers vying to have their chapters continue the story.
[I'd welcome more info---on the community book's contents. - D.R.]
* 8 writers contributed to the book, with winners from 5 different states.
* First chapter was written in September 2006, and the first entry was received in November 2006 when the project was opened for submissions.
* Donating all profits to 4 educational organizations, including Reach out and Read.
* There are many distinct elements that formulate this book: - Ads - Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags - Quick Response (QR) Codes Environmental aspects Both of the below technologies are being used to highlight their future application in the publishing industry. RFID Tags · MPI labels provided RFID tags.
· Used to communicate ISBN numbers and pricing information to hand held readers that could be used by store employees for inventory, and tracking purposes. Readers are not widely used at the store level, but the application is there especially as the unit pricing for these tags continues to drop. These tags can be programmed with 24 characters, but other tags can be programmed with a wide variety of information. QR Codes
· QR Code generator provided by Kaywa.
· 2-D barcodes that contain hidden messages or URL’s that can be read by a camera phone (given the right downloaded program).
· In this book we are using the technology to direct readers to specific pages throughout bookhitch to find more information about the book that contain fun little surveys and facts.
· Interestingly enough we found out about QR Codes via an article on FP Code technology (the 3D barcode), which is currently being test-marketed in Europe and Japan. The technology is so new that we contacted the company and had to get most of their materials translated from Japanese to English. More (in-depth) information can be found at this URL: http://www.bookhitch.com/sneakpeek.aspx.
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