Booktour.com now open to UK registrations

Filed by: Darren on August 6, 2007 at 11:44
Filed In: Marketing

BookTour.com is a new website - that's been launched by The Long Tail author Chris Anderson and co. - that lists details of authors' promotional tours.

It's simple and effective, easy to grasp, easy to use. Admittedly their homepage is a bit sparse and minimalist and they could do with a few usability enhancements here and there, but they have been adding-on plenty of new features recently (is their blog is anything to go by) and apparently a whole raft of further improvements are on the way.

And they've just opened the site to UK authors, readers and publishers: readers can now search for author events taking place in their immediate locality (or anywhere else, for that matter), whilst authors can upload information about their books to their profile page, and authors or publicists can post details of forthcoming book tour information.

There's not much UK info on there at the moment, which means it's a great time for any authors out there who are on tour in the near future to get on there and post their info. It's very easy to stand out in a small crowd and I think the sheer usefulness of a site like this will mean that its popularity will inevitably grow as word spreads, so it'll get busier and noisier as time goes on.

By which point they'll hopefully have launched customised search options (cross-referencing particular genres with UK-specific locations, for instance, so users can search for all sf / fantasy / horror events taking place in their hometown, or across the UK), customisable RSS feeds (it would be great if the feeds were based on the results of the aforementioned searches, but I don't know how technically feasible that might be) and some of the other useful-sounding enhancements that they're working on at the moment.

Anyway, if you're an author or a publicist, check the site out and get your data listed. And if you're a reader or a fan, start running those searches now, just in case you do find something. I'll bet the site's development team will be watching the traffic logs pretty closely to see where the activity is, and the more UK users they spot the faster they'll push through the UK-specific content sections of the site...