Exclusive: BookRix Launches Today as a Launch Pad for Emerging Writers

by Svetlana Gladkova

Today I am pleased to be able to exclusively report on launch of a very interesting website - BookRix. The Munich-based company has been operating the German-language site in the .de domain zone for a while now and today they are making the debut of the English-language version. The German-language community seems to be a pretty active one to me so hopefully for the company this will be repeated in the English-language version as well.

The site’s owners describe it as a YouTube or Flickr for emerging authors where they can easily showcase and share their work to get some extra visibility for their creations.

Basically the site functions by letting authors upload their novels or poetry in various formats, including pdf, doc or even simple text files. A book “published” in this matter can be either read online (with the interface very similar to other online book readers) or embedded on blogs or social networking profiles - whatever the author chooses to do with them.

Every author on the site can have a profile to accommodate all the books authored or liked. What’s more, every author can even have a fan club here for all the other members to demonstrate their appreciation of this person’s writing. The library on the site makes it possible for any visitor to discover both new books or poems and those that have already achieved some popularity among other members of the community so it can also be just the right place for you if you are constantly looking for something new to read and don’t want to go for the bestsellers. It is also possible to find some classical books here from authors like Mark Twain or Jack London.

Right now the website is supported by advertising only but I can see it generating some additional revenue by allowing the authors both to actually publish their creations and to get some extra visibility for their published works as featured content - but this can only be implemented if the community gets enough traction in the English-speaking world.

Of course it is quite understandable that the site will most probably attract amateurs instead of seasoned authors - simply because here the amateurs will be able to get some readers and also feedback (as well as the embedding tools to help achieve viral growth for a piece). Those who believe themselves to be experts in literature, will most certainly enjoy the community as well since they will be able to share feedback with the authors who upload their work to the site. Eventually this community could also be used by publishers to hunt for talents that may be somewhere out there looking for attention but never knowing how to reach the publishers directly.

So if you are either a novice writer or are just looking for some interesting books to read and probably share with your friends embedded in a blog post, BookRix sounds like the right community for you now that it is available in English. Here is an example of how an embedded book looks in a blog post: