UI note: when something looks like a button, it needs to be a button. The genre "buttons" are only active right around their text, which means that "SF" has a much smaller active area than "History", even though they present the same visual appearance.
I'd like it even more streamlined. Send five anonymized snippets to my inbox every Friday and let me click one button to order one of them to my door. Anyone know a service like this?
I love this idea! I don't read very much fiction because it's hard to find something worth the time investment. This model would enable me to find and buy fiction books I'm interested in.
It seems like this is going to be heavily biased away from traditionally published books if the authors/publishers have to upload the chapter. I'd actually prefer they were using Amazon to pull in mainstream books.
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I'm not sure I agree, it really does depend on your target audience, I saw it and it gave me a chuckle (as someone who remembers the flap about cookies a few years ago).
I spend about 1 hour a week at the bookstore, usually taking random books and reading the first page(s).
I also try to discover new books on Amazon from time to time by going over their selections and recommendations but I end up reading the same circle of authors.
I think your idea is brilliant by matching my IRL process.
I wish you a lot of success.
EDIT: about the website itself it's nicely done, minimalist and easy. I'd change the "Choose a genre" button to a dropdown. Also I'd have the top navigation (the exploration/submit buttons) merged with the right one with the menu following the scroll. This would be a a good incentive to navigate around (easier and faster too).
What is it you're looking for, exactly? Good grammar? Cheers to the OP for thinking outside the box, but I don't think this service helps me, nor would your technique. I yearn for good writing, but what I consider good writing can't be determined from reading one chapter, and certainly not a couple pages in the middle of a book. What matters to me is how the chapters (and the people/places/events in them) fit together. The storycraft, if you will. Good editing, internal consistency, etc. Once can only determine these things by reading the whole book, or at least most of it. And since I don't have the time to devote to reading bad books in the hope they'll be good, I greatly rely on reviews, including those from Amazon.
To me it's style, mostly. I used to just buy books, then got home, started reading and discovered I really couldn't stand the style of writing or the tone. I try to sample a little bit now.
I don't know if there's such a thing as "freelance editors" or "freelance typesetters" - but there's a need for these kind of services for self-published authors.
Some of the books I've read were okay, but could have been good with an editor and with nicer spell / grammar checking.
I don't know how that business could work?
Authors sometimes collaborate. Perhaps something like a author's co-op? They could pull in designers / artists for the covers and do cross-promotion too.
There are indeed freelance editors -- both at the copyedit level and at a higher level.
Self-pubbed authors often hire freelance artists for cover design.
And there are freelance book designers for both dead-tree and e-books. There are also services that provide "canned" book design service -- i.e. you pick from a template.
To me it seems that the hardest part of the whole equation for an indy author is promotion. There are so many books published daily that it's really hard to get readers for your work.
It would be great if this works, but there is a lot of noise in the book world. Even with good filtering I find myself putting down a lot of drivel. This said, if it opens up the variety of what we're reading, it can't hurt. Sometimes I wonder if Amazon and friends unduly cut down on the variety of what I see. The browsing ability of bookstores has been lost.
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I always love when someone posts the false-positives of their companies shitty firewall. It's not the website owners responsibility to be firewall friendly.
I think that #220 is currently the only story in the database tagged as "fantasy". Some of the genres (such as 'alt history' and 'western') have no tagged stories. I presume that this is due to the service having just launched--I'm sure that with enough exposure to self-published authors, this service will have a sizable chunk of content to work with by the end of the day.
