I can’t remember how I first heard about Bublish. But once I started looking more into what it is, I became very interested.
So I contacted Kathy Meis (@KatMeis and @bublishme) and asked if she’d be interested in guesting here to explain what exactly “Bublish” is all about.
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For hundreds of years, readers have met authors in bookstores. Occasionally, the meeting was face-to-face. Most of the time, though, it was through the author’s “voice.” In other words, the writer’s story is what spoke to the reader. It doesn’t sound as social as a face-to-face, but it is. Like a conversation, the written word conveys ideas, and either inspires engagement or disinterest. This is the quiet, social power of the bookstore browsing experience.
It’s nearly impossible to find this type of encounter in today’s noisy, crowded online book marketplace. It’s one of the reasons my company, Serendipite Studios, created Bublish, a social book discovery platform for writers and readers. We’re out to revolutionize the way writers share their stories and readers find books they’ll love.
With Bublish, authors share book bubbles, and readers get to browse through them. A book bubble consists of an excerpt and an author’s insight about that excerpt. We call this the story behind the story. Both of these elements are presented in a beautifully designed book bubble that also includes the author’s photo and bio, the book’s cover and synopsis as well as links to the author’s website. It’s about as close to the bookstore discovery experience as you can get online. And because we match writers and readers by genre and keywords, we can connect the right authors and books with the right readers without ruining the serendipity of browsing. In an age of immense content abundance, you need a few filters when you’re looking for good books.
Bublish is designed to solve a number of problems for writers and readers. For authors, Bublish will let them repurpose their best writing, the content of their books, and enrich it with the story behind the story. This creates an entirely fresh piece of content for authors to share across multiple social networks. Authors have a lot of demands on their time. We think it’s important to make it as easy and effective as possible for them to facilitate discovery of their work without feeling like salespeople. With Bublish, the social conversation starts with the voice of the author, just like it does in the bookstore. And since authors can create and share book bubbles in seconds, Bublish significantly lightens the author’s promotional content load.
For readers, Bublish recreates online all the pleasure of the bookstore discovery experience. No ads, no algorithms, no distractions…just browsing. Of course, once a reader finds a book or author they love, they’ll want to share it. Word-of-mouth continues to be the most popular way for readers to find new books. That’s why book bubbles are highly shareable across multiple social networks. Finally, Bublish will create a wonderful community for writers and readers to engage around stories. Imagine getting an invitation to chat with one of your favorite authors or being able to follow the book bubbles of an author you’ve never even heard of before.
If you want to see what the future of book discovery looks like, you should sign up for updates or a beta invite to Bublish. You can do this by visiting our website at www.bublish.com. We’re going to reveal the world’s first book bubble to our subscribers later this week, and launch our live beta next week. We can’t tell you everything we’re planning for Bublish yet, but we promise it’s going to be like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.
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Kathy Meis has been a professional writer for more than twenty years. She founded Serendipite Studios to empower those who create and enhance quality content. Next week, Serendipite Studios will launch the live beta of the revolutionary social book discovery platform Bublish. If you’d like to learn more or sign up for a beta invite, visit http://www.bublish.com. You can also follow her on Twitter @katmeis or @BublishMe.
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More articles about Bublish:
http://www.siriuspress.com/studio/2012/05/the-story-behind-your-story/
http://janefriedman.com/2012/05/31/writing-on-the-ether-40/
(a sample book bubble from Dr. Harrison Solow, about halfway down the page)
