{"id":1070,"date":"2010-03-31T09:30:42","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T04:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/?p=1070"},"modified":"2010-03-31T16:28:32","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T10:58:32","slug":"scribd-vs-bookbuzzr-an-authors-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/scribd-vs-bookbuzzr-an-authors-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Scribd vs BookBuzzr: An author’s perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

[A few days ago I came across Joel Friedlander’s<\/a> post – Getting Started with Scribd.com<\/a> and passed it on to friends. One thing led to another and soon I was asking our in-house author Chetan Dhruve<\/a> for his opinion. What he had to say would be of interest to most authors so, over to Chetan. :) ]<\/em>
\n
\nA disclaimer first:<\/em> I\u2019m a part of the BookBuzzr<\/a> team. But I\u2019m writing this post as a selfish author hell-bent on using the best marketing tools for my book, regardless of my affiliation with BookBuzzr.<\/p>\n

Let me give you a quick background: My marketing journey began with a manifesto I wrote that was published on ChangeThis.com<\/a>. The manifesto was so popular that I was able turn it into a (non-self-published) book titled \u201cWhy Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator”. In some ways, the marketing process was reversed for me. The manifesto \u2013 effectively a book summary \u2013 was followed by the book, rather than the other way round.<\/p>\n

Someone got hold of my manifesto and put it up on Scribd<\/a>. What happened then? Well, it had about 500 readers when I last checked (a few moments back) \u2013 this is well over a year after it was put on Scribd. In the grand scheme of things, particular in relation to our ambitions of being best-selling authors, this is a tiny number of readers. In contrast, the ChangeThis<\/a> manifesto has been posted on tons of torrent sites by people I don\u2019t know at all. This is in addition to the thousands of readers on ChangeThis itself. I don\u2019t have the figures, but it does seem to me that the number of readers of the manifesto on torrent sites and ChangeThis itself far outnumber those on Scribd.<\/p>\n

19.05.BossDictator<\/a> <\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

So speaking for myself, Scribd hasn\u2019t worked for me \u2013 but I never expected it to and further, it didn\u2019t satisfy a burning need that I had as an author: to make my book look and feel like a real book on my website. Before BookBuzzr came along, books were represented by boring static book cover images on author websites. I thought this was crazy given what was happening, technologically speaking, on the web. Moreover, with the advent of Facebook, Twitter<\/a> and so on, it was incredible that nothing was available that could help authors get their books onto those social networking sites.<\/p>\n

BookBuzzr<\/a> plugged in both gaps completely and effectively. First, the widget improved the look and feel of my book by leaps and bounds \u2013 like having Apple do its magic on my book. Second, the book appeared on Facebook and other places. Also importantly, BookBuzzr is, by far, the biggest source of traffic to my website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

So there\u2019s absolutely no comparison with Scribd but I don\u2019t blame Scribd for that \u2013after all, it\u2019s a document sharing site. It\u2019s not meant to make your book or your website look good, neither is it meant to help you market your book. As an author, I\u2019m looking for very specific tools that serve me \u2013 not a giant monster site that has millions of documents and users. Sure, you could put up your book excerpt on Scribd \u2013 there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. But I\u2019m just saying that it didn\u2019t work for me, and the contrast with BookBuzzr couldn\u2019t be greater.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chetan Dhruve<\/a> has been a part of BookBuzzr from its inception<\/a>. He has worked for several organizations including IBM, Cisco Systems and Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID). He has an MBA from Cass Business School (London) and has co-founded internet startups. Chetan is the author of ‘Why Your Boss is Programmed to be a Dictator<\/a>‘.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[A few days ago I came across Joel Friedlander’s post – Getting Started with Scribd.com and passed it on to friends. One thing led to another and soon I was asking our in-house author Chetan Dhruve for his opinion. What he had to say would be of interest to most authors so, over to Chetan. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3,8,143,141,142,144,140],"class_list":["post-1070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-marketing","tag-book-marketing","tag-bookbuzzr","tag-boss","tag-changethis","tag-chetan-dhruve","tag-dictator","tag-scribd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}