What’s the problem that the new author marketing site created by Mike Shatzkin and Peter Clifton, filedby.com is trying to solve? Other online book community sites (Goodreads, LibraryThing, Indigo’s online community) do the reader to book connecting, and reader to reader connecting well. But FiledBy is proposing one more way to connect—reader to author and vice versa.
Readers can connect and bond with each other by circling their wagons around a particular author’s page, building groups, finding titles they might not yet know about and, yes, purchasing books through a link that allows them to choose their own book vendor (Alibris, Amazon, Amazon CA, Indiebound, Powells Books, Barnes And Noble, Indigo, Borders).
What kind of author is going to do well here? Authors that don’t like or don’t want to build their own blog - yep. Authors who have a large backlist still in print—yep. Authors writing in a style that fans of already popular books might be into—maybe.
If an author already has an online presence, FiledBy isn’t necessarily going to deepen relationships with fans. This is more of a cocktail party than an intimate drink by the fire…it’s a place for readers with more than one deeply admired author to congregate and share info (not a Twilight kind of situation).
