[Marketing] Booklr

...crowdsource cover art and editing services...

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Really? Is that a good idea?

Pretty much getting as many opinions from as many people as possible.

And if they approached you instead of the other way around? Run.

BrigidGH:
I received an email today that sort of confused me ...

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This is always a red flag for me. Publishers (even self-publishers) shouldn't be spamming people for business.

BrigidGH:
Mr. Brody claimed to be curious about the status of my book and asked if I had time to speak this week. I don't understand why someone from a self-publishing site would want to speak to me––just to promote the website?

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Unless Mr Brody and you have spoken before or you've queried him about your book, I'd suggest that this is spam language there to get you to call him and in turn use the site's services.

Booklr Website:
Booklr is social media and promotion tools for authors made easy. From simplified Twitter and Facebook, to holding reader promotions and giveaways, to being able to track all your sales and review data all in one place.

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So basically, it's not intended to be a self-publisher per se, but a marketing/promotion/sales figure tool. Don't see how that equates to using it to release an electronic version of your book or how it ties together but saying that the site isn't built to support Explorer and I can't see the details that flash up when you look at the components of each package.

There are details on the site's founders here:

https://booklr.com/about

Briefly, none of them appear to have any actual publishing experience.

Jesse Solomon (who came up with the idea) has the following:

Booklr Website:
A voracious reader, Jesse started writing his first novel last year - Handicapped, a dark golf comedy. Three chapters in he began looking for a traditional publisher but quickly realized that he would be forced to sign an economically unfair deal (if he could even get an offer). Looking into alternative options he found that existing self-publishing sites were complicated, time-consuming, and ineffective, and he knew that the 21st century needed a better self-publishing platform. That's how Booklr was born. (Handicapped is still a work in progress.)

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Self-publishing isn't complicated. People do it every day. The economics of commercial publishing are neither here nor there if you don't actually have a manuscript to sell (which he doesn't appear to). So given that he's never self-published before nor been commercially published before, Booklr seems to me to basically be an experiment in how the team all think it might work.

Why would you want to be their guinea pig and potentially pay for the privilege?

All in all, it launched in May and while people I respect such as Nathan Bransford have blogged about it, I'd rather give it a year and see how other people have found it before trying it out. Also, I don't think it works unless you actually have a book out there on release.

MM

For crowdsourced cover read camel cover.

S/p sources do love to promote the idea of the cover you the author will like. As opposed to commercial publishing, which'll give you a cover you may hate, but which they think will sell the book. Hmm.