Book-face is a web site that uses social media to connect authors with readers and to disseminate news about books and authors to the local community. Using mobile devices such as widgets, along with RSS feeds, podcasts, and open source technology, we will create a community in which authors no longer have to depend solely on publishers and bookstores for publicity, readings, and a connection to their audience. Although it has a fanciful name (a play on “Facebook”), Book-face is a serious proposal to use social media to put authors, publishers, and reviewers face to face with a book-loving audience.
We would spend our first two years focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area before expanding to other locales.
Our project proposes to:
- offer readers live chats with authors and local reviewers
- distribute a weekly online show featuring local book authors
- feature author blogs with ratings and reader comments
- stream and create an archive of videos, vodcasts, podcasts, and transcripts of interviews with book authors, focusing first on local authors
- create a website with a curated book review archive, resource list of book review websites, and reviews by readers that includes reviews of graphic novels and memoirs (two important new trends in publishing)
- commission and license book reviews on local and national book releases
- feature user-generated content on event listings and blogs, including blogs on how a given book changed someone’s life
- create widgets and iPhone apps that offer RSS feed daily updates about local book readings, book clubs, library fairs, bookstore events, and other publishing events throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
- allow local authors, publishers, and reviewers to conduct live online chats with their readers that will be carried on the internet and iPhone apps
- connect authors with local book clubs through social media like Facebook Connect and Twitter
- help authors promote their books and reviews in talks at special events and book “theme nights” at participating local cafes and restaurants
- create more opportunities for authors to give talks at bookstores, libraries, schools, book clubs, colleges and universities, and professional organizations
- link to book reviews in local newspapers and magazines
- serve as a resource for agents, established authors, and aspiring authors
In our first year, we propose to focus our review section on non-fiction books on health, including psychology and emotional health, exercise and nutrition, children’s health and parenting, caregiving, disease and illness, green living, and scientific breakthroughs. We already have an archive of 140 reviews by physicians and veteran journalists of top-rated health and medical books. After we create a comprehensive, authoritative curated collection of book reviews on health, we will expand to include fiction and other types of non-fiction.
Making book news accessible
In the San Francisco Bay Area, once a mecca for book lovers, authors, critics, and readers, news about books is getting harder and harder to find. There’s no clearing-house for book reviews or information about new book releases, literary events, or even local authors. In local newspapers, book review sections are becoming smaller or folding entirely, community TV shows featuring local book authors have been canceled – even newspaper listings about book tours and readings have all but disappeared. To find out about book tours, reviews, and other literary events in the area, you’d have to be on the mailing list of every bookstore, publisher, and literary organization in the area.
Not only have local book review sections and listings shrunk or folded, but there are fewer bookstores to host book readings and distribute book and publishing news. In the past few years, many legendary local book stores serving literati nationwide (including Cody’s, Stacey’s, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place) and even giant book chains like Barnes and Noble have closed their doors in local shopping centers due to low book sales – trends that are mirrored nationwide. This has had a dampening effect on the community itself, as bookstores have traditionally been a place where people can congregate, read and linger for hours.
By consolidating Bay Area book and literary events in an RSS feed, we will give local book fans, buyers, authors, and occasional readers a way to check on daily book readings, conferences, sales, book reviews, and other events on their computer, iPhone, and regular cell phone. The purpose: To help books, authors, reviewers, and book lovers survive and even thrive in an Internet era where newspapers and book stores are under siege, many publishing houses neglect all but the celebrity blockbusters, and news about local authors and book events may not reach even the most avid readers.
Our book events news feed will help drive foot and online traffic to newspapers, bookstores, book clubs, and community literary events like LitQuake, poetry slams, and so on. We will take a more active role by using social media to publicize readings in participating cafes, restaurants, and other public places; this way, authors will not have to depend as heavily on publishing house PR staff to arrange book readings and publicity for new releases. We will also offer user-generated content and a curated collection of book reviews that will feature reviews we’ve commissioned, a selection of reader reviews, and reviews we’ve licensed from other sources.
Book-face: Economic stimulus to local community?
Book-face takes an innovative approach by serving as a social and New Media clearing-house for all things book-related in local communities. We did extensive research to see whether such a model already existed, and have not found anything like it. Even in a book mecca like the San Francisco Bay area, bookstores and other organizations promoting author tours and literary events are not connected in a central place online or through social media.
Local authors and reviewers, like others nationwide, are also facing shrinking publishers’ budgets for reviews, book tours, and readings. Today, more than ever, most publishers are pouring their resources into celebrity “blockbusters” and allotting fewer dollars to publicize new releases of high-quality fiction and non-fiction. The lack of publicity results in the “remaindering” of many outstanding new books not long after they are released. Our platform will give book authors and reviewers the tools they need to publicize high-quality books and new releases in the community.
Our model is also innovative in that it will serve as an economic stimulus to the local community – driving more traffic to bookstores, literary events, local newspapers and magazines (through linkage and publicity), and cafes and restaurants participating in book readings, talks, and “theme nights.” It democratizes what it often seen as an elitist medium by embracing readers of all persuasions and featuring user-generated content. Most importantly, through the use of open source technology, this model could be replicated at a low cost across the country.
Information on the team:
For the past 20 years I have been involved with books and book reviewing while working fulltime as a journalist and editorial director. I started the Phoenix Review of Books in Santa Cruz (a pull-out section of the now-defunct Santa Cruz Phoenix). While working as a news editor and reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting for 12 years, I edited several books and anthologies for CIR, including Global Dumping Ground (a Bill Moyers companion book to a PBS Frontline documentary of the same name). At Time Inc. Health, I was a senior editor for a best-selling book on self-care (The Essential Self-Care Advisor), and as a senior Time Warner editor at Hippocrates magazine, a national magazine for physicians, I helped publish in-depth interviews with physician-authors. I also served as an outside editor on Harcourt-Brace’s biography of Cesar Chavez (The Fight in the Fields) and Generation Extra-Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity (Perseus, 2004). As a freelance book editor for two decades, I have worked closely with authors, agents, and publishing houses, and have had an insider’s view into the publishing industry.
I also have a strong background in video and online media. While at CIR, I worked with both print and television outlets, including CBS’s “60 Minutes" and PBS Frontline. For the last 10 years, I have been the editor-in-chief of an online health and medical content team and web services provider, Consumer Health Interactive. There, I’ve served as the executive producer of more than 60 online documentary videos, which have won awards and citations from film festivals, the International Health & Medical Media Awards, and others. We have also used social media to create an archive of our videos on YouTube and a collection of our health Podcasts on iTunes.
At CHI, I have helped develop an extensive online book review section as well as health content A-Z, interactive tools, self-care centers, video, and multimedia; we also ran an online health community involving health professionals and readers for more than five years. CHI has brought in millions of dollars in revenue from clients over the years, and I feel confident in my ability to create a platform that will become self-sustaining.
The women-led team would also include:
- Two senior female editors -- a former San Francisco Chronicle editor and former Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times reporter who are also experienced in online video. They will create the book review archive and weekly video show featuring local authors.
- A prize-winning female videographer who has produced award-winning online documentaries on a variety of issues
- A female interactive tools specialist and a male designer and Flash engineer who have both helped produce documentaries, animations, multimedia, and community boards
- A male veteran developer who we have worked with closely and who has a special interest in community platforms