Hi Everyone,
I'm D.J., the CEO of Hunt to Read. First of all, appreciate everyone taking the time to visit the site; my co-founder, Rick, and I appreciate all of the feedback, good and bad.
One of the things about starting a new company is that there's so much going on that it's easy to overlook certain items not directly related to site functionality. One of those overlooked items was the FAQ, which hadn't been updated since we incorporated in April. As a result of some of your feedback, I've taken the time to update it again; the new document is now available on our site.
Basically, I'm an indie writer just like you guys; released my first book in December, and have released five more since then (mostly novella-length stuff and a box set). The first few months "in the biz," a few things frustrated me:
1) The scammy, "give us $30 and we'll tweet about your book once every three months" sites. Obviously not worth it! Not only that, but there are all kinds of scams geared toward authors, from contests to those abhorrent Vanity Presses looking to suck the life from unsuspecting would-be indies.
2) The incestuous nature of the Amazon rankings. By that I mean that it seems like popular books get noticed, but some hidden gems might go undiscovered. I'm not talking about my own; I'm not THAT megalomaniacal (grin), but rather other indie writers I knew who put out good, professional-looking products but who weren't gaining traction, when in the past they might have gained some sales just by being on the shelf in a bookstore. Of course, the big chain bookstores are nearly extinct, and the indie bookstores that survive tend to be smaller stores with a more hand-picked selection of books.
3) The lack of detailed analytics for my book pages. True, there are ways to get
some analytics on various retailers' sites, but certainly not all of them, and definitely not on discreet items like "is my cover decent or not?", and "could my blurb use some work?"
I got in touch with a friend from college and we came up with Hunt to Read. As some of you noted, we want to make browsing for books fun again, like it used to be to go through bookstores, hunting for that next hidden gem.
Simultaneously, we can provide value to authors through our analytics, (in the future) premium listing options (including author mailing list integration in the future among others), and plenty of other "value add" propositions for paying members.
We've changed our business model from the much-derided Bronze/Silver/Gold system to just a "free listing/pay for analytics and extras through membership" plan. I cannot reiterate this enough:
your book can always be on the site for free. It's up to us to convince you that site membership above and beyond that is worth your while by providing the commensurate value.
To those ends, I encourage you to list a book or two on our site to gain access to the analytics for six months, absolutely no-risk. You don't even need to enter a credit card number or anything--six months FREE. What's better than free?
And yeah, though I don't envision putting our readers in
A Clockwork Orange-style setups to get a "captive" audience (I admit--poor phrasing on my part!), we do have a number of solutions that we're implementing over the next several releases to drive reader traffic to the site in a manner that will make the experience fun and enjoyable for them, and will provide meaningful data to our authors.
I just ask you to check out the site, poke around, throw up a book or two and explore our interface. And, by all means, I'm happy to pop back in from time-to-time to answer questions or address feedback that you might have.
I just wanted to make it clear, yes, we are running a business, but one of our core goals is to listen to our readers and writers, and really build a site that both groups can thoroughly enjoy and from which both can benefit. It wouldn't do us any good to run a scam because our plans for the site are big; well beyond the scope of the current set-up.
Thanks for your time, and by all means, I'm happy to address questions, comments, concerns, and criticisms.
Happy hunting,
D.J. Gelner
Chief Executive Officer
Hunt to Read LLC
http://www.hunttoread.com