fReado – another book marketing portal

There are so many online places for book marketing and book networking these days. Places like Goodreads and LibraryThing have been around a while now, Amazon tries to be way more than just a book shop and so on. I’ve recently stumbled across another one called fReado.

Rather than trying to be a place that is first and foremost about readers and their favourite books, fReado is set up as an unashamedly targeted marketing site. Authors put their books up there along with a small profile page and then upload a PDF of their book (or an excerpt of it). The book is then converted into what is actually quite a funky little online booklet and you can link reviews, media mentions and so on to it. Subsequently you can attract fans to yourself as an author and/or to your books. The options are there to promote any books through a large variety of social network with the ability to directly post Twitter tweets, Facebook updates, Digg, Reddit and so on.

The pages are actually set up to encourage the author to market their work through the fReado site using the site’s own generators. For example, put in your Twitter account details, write your piece and it gets Tweeted directly. I’m not entirely sure what the advantage is of this over just tweeting about your book directly on Twitter and directing people to your own web page. Perhaps fReado are hoping to develop some kind of central integrity. I can’t really figure out what’s in it for the fReado people. My guess is that they’ll wait until they have a decent number of authors and titles on board and then start offering paid marketing packages. We’ll see.

fReado advertise their marketing concept thus:

Marketing your book online can seem like a pretty daunting project because of the highly fragmented nature of the Internet. You have new websites and social networks cropping up almost every day. So where should you focus your efforts? How do you implement an effective online book marketing campaign? To help you, the staff at fReado.com (www.freado.com) have created the table below to ensure that you have a base level of presence on the Internet. Please share your book-widget on at least a few of the networks mentioned in the table. While sharing the book-widget is extremely easy and self-explanatory, we have provided you with basic instructions to help you get started. Please note that fans of your book and your friends can also share your book-widget on their individual networks. We have also created a support group for authors marketing their books online on Facebook. This is a place for authors to trade ideas, encourage each other and help each other succeed with their book sales. To join this group, sign-in to Facebook and search for “A Support Group for Authors Marketing Their Books Online”

Anyway, I’ve signed up and uploaded the first three chapters of both RealmShift and MageSign and built the basic profiles for each of them. I’ll see what comes of it. If you’re interested, have a look and click to become a fan of me and/or the books. It might be worthwhile.

You can find my profile page here, the RealmShift page here and the MageSign page here.

What do you think of the site? Good, bad, worthwhile, pointless?

.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2009 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Books, Cool Places to Visit, Fantastic Fiction, Marketing, Websites, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.