“As a reader, I am incredibly frustrated with online book discovery”, says Ben Fox.
“Goodreads has not built features that help readers find amazing books or to help authors find readers for their books. Meanwhile, Amazon is selling books the same way they sell toothpaste.”
I wonder whether, as a reader, you relate to Ben’s words? I certainly do. Amazon’s recommendation engine is laughably defective for me: having perused the Mesopotamian epic poem the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, Amazon now believes I’m a candidate for “Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History”. I guess that’s AI for you… they’re both kinda old, right?
Ben is our guest on Pop-Ups this Sunday. He believes he’s created a better way for readers to discover books with his website shepherd.com. As writers, we need to hear what he’s got to say, so please join me.
On Saturday, we’re doing something a little different in the Huddle.
I’d like you to bring along your very favourite (or favorite, if you’re on the pond’s eastern shore) first page from a published novel. I think this is going to be quite a lot of fun, and probably quite instructive. You’ve got a couple of days to think about it.
1) Remember to first put your name down to join the Huddle here.
2) When Jonny opens the Submission & Joining Details group, please post your chosen first page there – as you normally would for anything else you bring along to a Huddle.
Hint – any easy way to do this is to use Amazon’s (sorry, Ben) “Look Inside” feature. Open it to the first page, and use the “Take Screenshot” command that most browsers have to save the first page as an image file. You can then simply upload the image file to the Submission & Joining Details group, or you could paste it into a Word doc and upload.
Any questions, just ask.
Hope to see you over the weekend!
Peter
“Goodreads has not built features that help readers find amazing books or to help authors find readers for their books. Meanwhile, Amazon is selling books the same way they sell toothpaste.”
I wonder whether, as a reader, you relate to Ben’s words? I certainly do. Amazon’s recommendation engine is laughably defective for me: having perused the Mesopotamian epic poem the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, Amazon now believes I’m a candidate for “Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History”. I guess that’s AI for you… they’re both kinda old, right?
Ben is our guest on Pop-Ups this Sunday. He believes he’s created a better way for readers to discover books with his website shepherd.com. As writers, we need to hear what he’s got to say, so please join me.
On Saturday, we’re doing something a little different in the Huddle.
I’d like you to bring along your very favourite (or favorite, if you’re on the pond’s eastern shore) first page from a published novel. I think this is going to be quite a lot of fun, and probably quite instructive. You’ve got a couple of days to think about it.
1) Remember to first put your name down to join the Huddle here.
2) When Jonny opens the Submission & Joining Details group, please post your chosen first page there – as you normally would for anything else you bring along to a Huddle.
Hint – any easy way to do this is to use Amazon’s (sorry, Ben) “Look Inside” feature. Open it to the first page, and use the “Take Screenshot” command that most browsers have to save the first page as an image file. You can then simply upload the image file to the Submission & Joining Details group, or you could paste it into a Word doc and upload.
Any questions, just ask.
Hope to see you over the weekend!
Peter
