Hachette Launches ChapterShare Facebook App
Sharing whole chapters of upcoming books? There's an app for that. Big Six publisher Hachette Book Group hopped aboard the unstoppable Facebook train yesterday, releasing an app called ChapterShare that lets you read free excerpts of upcoming books.
The app also makes it idiot-proof easy to pre-order the books through Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound, and to share the preview chapters with friends. Though if your Facebook friends are anything like mine, they'll see a 10,000-word novel excerpt smashed between the food photos, cat memes and DJ night event invites in their newsfeed and give it the ole mental TL;DR. Still, you’ve got to give Hachette credit for trying, and given the power of word-of-mouth, it might even work.
The publisher is launching the app with the opening chapters from James Patterson's novel NYPD Red (released October 8) and Michael Connelly's The Black Box (November 26). They're available now. You have to "Like" the author to read the excerpt, which is counter-intuitive to me. If you already "Like" an author, you're probably going to read the book anyway. If you don't, because you're not familiar with their work, wouldn't it make sense to let you read the excerpt first so you can determine whether or not you "Like" them? It's all about exposing readers to new writers.
What do you think: are they going to sell more books this way?
News by Kimberly Turner
Kimberly Turner is an internet entrepreneur, DJ, editor, beekeeper, linguist, traveler, and writer. This either makes her exceptionally well-rounded or slightly crazy; it’s hard to say which. She spent a decade as a journalist and magazine editor in Australia and the U.S. and is now working (very, very slowly) on her first novel. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics and lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, two cats, ten fish, and roughly 60,000 bees.
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They'll sell more books. JP and MC fans will already be buying those books, and giving them a little taste will whet their appetite. So they will almost be a sure thing, while non-fans, or semi-regular readers, most of whom are probably on FB - they just might be inspired to grab a book if it catches their eye. Especially if there's a discounted link to Amazon or something right at the end of the chapter.