Author Cheryl Kaye Tardif interviews Vikram Narayan from BookBuzzr.com

Hello Vikram, and welcome to The Write Type ~ Multi-Author Musings. We are so happy to have you visit us. Since I’ve used BookBuzzr and fReado.com myself, I can say that you offer a terrific service for authors and their readers. And it’s free!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Are you a writer? Reader?

I’m a serial entrepreneur who’s obsessed about building the next big thing on the Internet. I earned an MS in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University some years ago. I’m also a keen martial artist and practitioner of Aikido. I’m an avid reader of books and listener of audio books. I do have a book inside me that is waiting to come out some day soon.

Where did the idea for BookBuzzr come from? Why did you decide to create it?

A few months ago, an author friend of mine – Chetan Dhruve – was describing the pain that authors face in marketing their books online. There are two problems with traditional author sites:

1. Most of the traffic goes to 'destination sites' such as Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo or the New York Times. So your author site may not receive the kind of traffic that you would want.
2. Even if a fan of your book comes to your site, it's not easy for her to easily share information about your book with her friends.

So how do you market your book in an era where the attention-spans of consumers measure a few micro-seconds? How do you tempt your potential readers to flip-through the pages of your book? How do you allow easy sharing of your book on networks such as Facebook, MySpace and other social networks?

So I asked him what would be a dream online marketing tool. Chetan, in a few moments of inspiration, described what he’d want and we sketched out the screens of the ultimate online book-marketing tool. I got the product developed in a few months using developer resources at another software business that I own.

What exactly is BookBuzzr and how does it work?

BookBuzzr is a free, online book-marketing technology that can be placed instead of your book-cover image on your author website, Facebook profile and blog. BookBuzzr is more than just a replacement for your book-cover image. It's a portable author website that allows your book information and extract to be shared on Facebook, Blogs, MySpace and more. So every time a fan of yours decides to post your book-widget on his or her blog, your entire information (including where to buy and buzz about your book) becomes available there. It’s like your business card on the Internet!

Apart from the easy share-ability, we've worked hard at making the pages of your book look and act like a real book. So when a reader clicks on the edge of the book, the page turns like a real book. Somehow, this seems to elicit a "wow!" from most people who try BookBuzzr.

fReado.com is the site which carries all the books that are available in BookBuzzr format.

Is it difficult for an author to set up a BookBuzzr widget?

Putting up your book into BookBuzzr format is quite simple. If you know how to share your videos and photos on Facebook or MySpace you know how to use BookBuzzr.

How many authors are using fReado?

We expect to have over a 1,500 authors & books on fReado by the end of this month.

Are there any recognizable names using BookBuzzr? Any “big” authors”?

We have quite a few big name authors using BookBuzzr. Chetan Dhruve whose inspired vision gave us the start for BookBuzzr is a pretty well-known name and his book has become an international sleeper-hit that’s been translated into 5 languages. Author Tony Eldridge whose book “The Samson Effect”, acquired by a Hollywood studio, is also using BookBuzzr.

Are publishers using your service to promote their authors’ books?

Yes. We’re making it easier for publishers to mass upload their books and author information with just a few clicks. We’ve got about 60 Publishers who have begun using fReado and BookBuzzr.

Can you give us an example of a BookBuzzr book widget?



Where do you see BookBuzzr in 3 years?

The other day, we got a testimonial from the author Lee Murphy and he said, “I think you have a terrific service and I know I have already sold one copy on Amazon as a direct result of it.”

So we know that we have a unique little book-marketing technology that every author needs. Our challenge is to let authors know about this free resource that can help every author in building and extending their platform. So in terms of where we see BookBuzzr in 3 years … we want to be the first place where every author goes when he or she begins to think about marketing books online. If every book-cover image on every author, publisher and book-seller’s website is replaced with the BookBuzzr book-widget, then I would say that most of our mission has been accomplished.

Towards this end, we’re making several improvements to BookBuzzr in the coming months to make it easier for fans to distribute a book-widget on their Facebook profiles, Twitter, blogs, social networks and cell-phones.

Thank you, Vikram!! I am sure that authors will be very excited about your service/product, especially after they've tried it once.

For more information on BookBuzzr and fReado, please check out http://www.bookbuzzr.com/ and http://www.freado.com/.