“You can’t get yourself on Oprah,” says Carol Fitzgerald of the Book Report Network, “but you can get yourself on the web.” And that’s the business plan in a nutshell of three new ventures — AuthorsOnTheWeb.com, PreviewPort.com, and YourNextBook.com — aiming to bring authors and audiences together on a browser near you. Without further ado, here’s a brisk tour through this trio of slightly differing business models.
Fitzgerald’s AuthorsOnTheWeb.com is the “Internet design and marketing division” of the Book Report Network (which includes bookreporter.com and teenreads.com, among others), and will develop distinct, branded sites for individual authors, to be paid for by author, agent, or publisher. Fees run from $300 plus a $50/month maintenance charge (special charter prices) to $7500 or more for the site of your dreams, including options for trivia games, reader comments, a community leader, and the like. The idea is to make information about an author’s backlist readily accessible to the public, regardless of who published the books. Plans also call for a yellow pages–style “vortal” for publishing and authors on the web, reading group guides, advice for writers — not to mention a premium partner relationship with Amazon.
PreviewPort.com, by contrast, is a more centralized collection of author sites founded by Susan Bergman, and will give authors free pages or have them plunk down cash for more elaborate sites. Partnerships with the likes of S&S, FSG, and Holt will help highlight newly released books, while a business alliance with iCopyright.com will support downloadable content (articles, stories, poems, e-books, etc.), for which permissions will be cleared and fees seamlessly collected from the public. An online bookstore known as Cargo will sell books in multiple formats, including print, audio, and e-books, available for shipping or downloading as desired. Those authors maintaining a “Deluxe Portfolio” will also have the special capability to sell reprints of their shorter works directly from their sites.
Lastly, YourNextBook.com aims to create a kind of virtual authors’ pavilion of distinct authors’ pages. “Authors are our partners, not our clients,” says founder Joshua Horwitz, and YourNextBook aspires to be a frictionless interface for authors and readers. As part of the deal, an author who signs on to have a site developed on the YourNextBook network will receive an equity stake in the company, plus a share in the revenue, which will come from advertising. The site is expected to operate independently of publishers, and will link to booksellers, with no particular preference for which bookseller makes the sale (though indies will be specially courted). As noted elsewhere, a somewhat eyebrow-raising feature of the site will be an emphasis on authors’ book picks, whereby authors will be asked to provide annotated lists of recommendations, with royalties paid to the author on any sale that originates from their page, whether it be that author’s work or, say, a friend’s book that they happened to recommend. All of which inexorably brings to mind that timeless reviewers’ refrain: You plug my book, and I’ll plug yours.
