Contributed by David Dunham
This is the first blog post from BookGrabbr. I am one of the founders and CEO, and have worked over 40 years in book publishing. This first one is an introduction to BookGrabbr and intended for authors and publishers who are looking for more efficient and effective ways to market and promote their books – which is the universal challenge in the book world. In future blogs, we will cover specific topics related to book publishing, social media, and specifically ideas and tips to make the book promotion process easier for authors.
The marketing process is vastly important to the success of any book. Without proper exposure, your book may never realize sales of more than a few hundred copies. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to be noticed amidst all the noise in today’s marketplace. And, with our present economy, fewer publishers and authors have the financial means to promote books that will generate large exposure.
But imagine, as an author, being able to share your book with thousands of people and knowing that it will get attention.
What is BookGrabbr?
At its heart, BookGrabbr is an online platform for authors to promote their books through their preferred social networks—Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook—and discover thousands of new readers. This company was created in the spirit of increasing author visibility in a world where it’s difficult, and bordering on impossible, for authors to raise awareness of a new book.
Many authors invest advertising and marketing dollars into social media such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and more. If you do this, it’s important to ensure that your strategy works. With BookGrabbr’s sophisticated platform and proprietary e-reader, it will now be easier than ever to make social networking work for you. BookGrabbr was designed to help all authors and publishers who might be looking for more economical ways to promote their books and generate increased impressions and sales in today’s marketplace. Because of this, BookGrabbr incorporates an innovative and easy to navigate online marketing tool.
“Social media changes everything – and especially with the BookGrabbr model, because it can work exponentially for you. And because people share it with their networks, their networks share it with their networks, it geometrically mushrooms into potentially millions of impressions, which can absolutely motivate buying behavior. The reason BookGrabbr works is because it harnesses the power of social media for everybody in the value chain.” – Michael Hyatt, New York Times Bestselling Author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World & Former Chairman & CEO Thomas Nelson Publishers
The BookGrabbr service benefits readers, too, of course. For readers, it provides a free service to access and read new books and previews of books from best selling authors, discover new authors, and share the experience of reading a good book with friends from around the world.
How can BookGrabbr help you?
With over 800 thousand new books published each year in the United States, it is getting more and more difficult for authors and publishers to promote and sell their books, and to find new readers, as well. Ultimately, success is about promotion and building your platform. Whether you’re a bestselling author, or a first-time author, BookGrabbr can be a game changer for you.
You can share your entire book for greater visibility, or choose to share the first few chapters and hook new readers into purchasing the complete work. Self-published authors aren’t the only ones who can benefit from BookGrabbr, though; publishing companies are quickly getting on board with the concept, including Simon & Schuster. Liz Perl, the Chief Marketing Officer at Simon & Schuster, recently stated: “What I love about BookGrabbr is that it’s really book- and reader-centric, as well as author-centric. It’s easy to use, but it’s also about books, built with readers and authors in mind.”
How does BookGrabbr work?
Readers who discover your book can download (or “grabb”) the book quickly and easily. All they have to do in order to begin reading your book is to share it through their social media. This is completely automated through BookGrabbr’s sophisticated app and web design, so it takes only a single click for your friends to share to their friends. When they click to share, their friends will see what they are reading and have a chance to “grabb” your book too.
In other words, readers can share your book within their network in order to have access to the text. When the people in their network want to read the book, too, they will also share your book to their network, and so on. This way, in just a short amount of time, your book can travel the world to literally hundreds of thousands of potential readers you couldn’t have reached otherwise. With the click of just a few buttons, the exposure for your book can mushroom into potentially millions of impressions worldwide.
Once readers have begun to access your book, BookGrabbr also provides authors and publishers a chance to reach out to the readers who have downloaded their free content. Authors can quickly and easily send a message to interested readers and say something along the lines of, “Thank you for grabbing my book. If you enjoyed it, please download my next book.” This way, the marketing value of this platform is ongoing.
And readers love BookGrabbr because they can access thousands of new books and previews of new books free of charge.
What makes BookGrabbr different?
The most powerful way to encourage readers to read is through word-of-mouth recommendations from friends. BookGrabbr bottles that power up and offers it to readers (and authors) digitally via social media networks.
Many web sites invite readers to come to them and read. BookGrabbr’s primary function, however, is to facilitate the pushing of books and previews from authors to interested readers through social media accounts by allowing friends to grab their book, share their book, and then have access to read that book.
Any author can share a link to their book through social media, but until BookGrabbr, there was no platform that allowed an author to control how much of their book could be read before purchasing, nor was there the sharing feature unique to BookGrabbr.
BookGrabbr is the only platform that offers indie authors the opportunity to not only control the content that they present to readers, but also to track who those readers are and where they come from. With BookGrabbr, you can vastly increase brand awareness and sales.
Thanks for checking us out at www.bookgrabbr.com.
You can email David Dunham at david@bookgrabbr.com
Editor Note from Bookshop Bistro:
We made the decision to include this article as this is a new tool available to authors that has a unique concept, a reasonable price and at least one author from this group has been utilizing the tool with some level of success. As with anything to do with publishing, please do your research and make sure that you fully understand any service or tool that you choose to pay money for and that you feel confident with the tool.
Bookshop Bistro 