eLiterate: Get Readers 'Glued' to Your Books

So let's say you're an author: you've written the book, gone through the agent-and-editor process, found distribution, and actually saw your book in print and for sale online. Now you need an audience, and this is quite possibly the hardest part. But the resident geniuses at AdaptiveBlue have a little something that might help, which they call Glue.

You need something to get readers' attention -- you need, in today's web vernacular, to get sticky. Enter Glue: this is what you'd get if you mashed up Facebook's social media platform with an Amazon wishlist, and tossed Twitter into the mix. When you add Glue to your FireFox browser (super-easy, btw), the program sniffs out the data on page you're currently viewing and recognizes the media format -- so if you're looking at an author biography on Wikipedia, or an album description on Rhapsody, Glue identifies the page as such and logs it into your viewing history.

Once you sign up for an account and start 'sticking' to things (that is, identifying what pieces of media you like), Glue makes social connections to other subscribers who have similar taste.

This, my fellow scriveners, is great news. Many different sites (like Shelfari) have attempted to get readers to create a profile replete with their book preferences. But this process is laborious: I'll be damned if I want to add yet another freaking destination site to my already cumbersome list, or spend the time to log in a few hundred ISBNs of books I've read. And for most authors, getting your book in front of people on those sites is like door-to-door sales.

With Glue, you cut out the destination-site trap and allow your "personal brand" to travel around the web. Whenever another Glue subscriber comes across one of your books (be it on Amazon, Shelfari, Borders, bn.com, et al.), they'll see your "profile" and can learn more about you as an author. You can make more meaningful connections based on media preferences, and gain friends who can track your work around the web. You can even create widgets of your books and stick them in clever places, like your Facebook profile or in Gather articles.

AdaptiveBlue CEO Alex Iskold elaborates on how exactly to get "sticky" with Glue in a recent blog post. Hit the jump to read more about this amazing social-media roadshow: http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=1151.