Monday, March 06, 2006

Finding readers

Speaking of finding readers for your book(s), which we were on Friday, there is a new site up which you might, perhaps, wish to take a look at if you have a book to publicise.

It's called Penstripes.com, and it offers a free service for 45 days. After 45 days it will cost you $365 to remain on the site for four years.

Well, $365 isn't a lot by advertising standards, and at least you have a chance to assess the value of the service before you shell out. But in the early days, if not the long run, this site, like all sites, is going to struggle to find readers.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

don't think it'll do so well with the Brits. Sounds too much like 'poo stripes'...

Peter L. Winkler said...

The whole enterprise seems inspired by Alex Tew's Million Dollar Homepage, but, according to Dave Munger, Tew actually employed professional publicists to make his site known.

How will Penstripes get the word out? "Viral marketing." Which is internet huggermugger that is basically bullshit.

I also didn't see any content there to read. Without content, nobody will spend more than a few seconds before moving on.

Anonymous said...

There's content there to read, depending on your browser. From what I've experienced, IE does well on sites like these but Firefox, Monzilla and a few others don't do so well. Not sure what that's about. Viewing the site in IE does produce pop up text about the book. Just fyi. I, personally, think it's worth a try. It's different than what everyone's else is doing which is basically cloning the original site. At least this one has a niche. Just like the Million Dollar Homepage, there's going to be haters just because they didn't think of it first, which seems to be the case here from a few of the post.