If you have a book published, or you are writing one, I urge you to check out www.Redroom.com. This website premiered on December 21, 2007 and is a online community for writers. So far a few dozen have signed up, including Salman Rushdie and Amy Tan.
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The site is meant to appeal to authors, booksellers, publishers as even general readers as a kind of one-stop shop for biographical information, book reviews, blogs, video and audio content, and author appearances. It's a virtual place where writers can network and promote themselves--and in a world where publishers put most of their efforts into promoting their best selling authors (after all, publishing is a business)—Redroom.com puts writers of limited or no success on an equal footing, providing each with a Web page and blog.
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Membership on redroom.com is free to all writers. Publishers are also being invited to have free Web pages, with Chronicle Books serving as the Web site's first test case. The founder, Ivory Madison, has collected $1.25 million in venture capital for the business and has hired a staff of 15. She expects to break even in 2008 and make $15 million in gross revenue in 2009.
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As the Internet becomes more important to the book industry, publishing houses increasingly focus on viral marketing, creating book-related videos and individual author sites, doing outreach to bloggers and even releasing books for downloading on the Web. Thanks to Redroom.com, writers can now do this for themselves.
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Some 10 percent of Redroom Omnimedia Corp. is owned by private investors, whose ranks include venture capitalists and investment bankers as well as publishing industry executives such as Nion McEvoy, chairman of Chronicle Books; Internet guru Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.
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Check it out and see if we can create a community of Peace Corps writers on Redroom.com.
