Fanado = An Online Event and Marketing Space for Writers and Publishers

Margaret Atwood, famed poet and writer, has created a digital place where publishing professionals will now be able to create live meet and greet events for their authors and other artists, anytime and anywhere, engaging and expanding their audiences while promoting new works.

This is a beta site that has a lot of promise, in my humble opinion. It is a very innovative idea that marries a traditional marketing concept with new technology to produce an instant virtual/digital event palace for mingling with fans, publishers and other industry professionals, expanding your base and marketing your works.

And Fanado has some very impressive industry sponsors on board.

'Audible.com, Wattpad, Random House, Inc. are among those companies that supported Fanado’s indiegogo fundraising campaign (http://www.indiegogo.com/fanado) with a commitment to a one-year exclusive event stage on the Fanado beta site.'

PRWeb press release in SFGate has more details:

Fanado Announces its First Publishing Industry Sponsors



Fanado, the online video conference and signing service founded by acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, is now joined by seven major providers and promoters of publishing in the digital age including Audible.com, Wattpad, and Random House.

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) July 13, 2012

Fanado, the online video conference and signing service founded by acclaimed author Margaret Atwood, is now joined by seven major providers and promoters of publishing in the digital age.

Audible.com, Wattpad, Random House, Inc. are among those companies that supported Fanado’s indiegogo fundraising campaign (http://www.indiegogo.com/fanado) with a commitment to a one-year exclusive event stage on the Fanado beta site. These innovators will now be able to create live meet and greet events for their authors and other artists, anytime and anywhere, engaging and expanding their audiences while promoting new works.

Audible (“engaging millions of listeners with stories told”) will conduct their first Fanado events from the floor of ThrillerFest (NY) on Friday, July 13. Beth Anderson, EVP & Publisher of Audible, Inc., says, “The Fanado channel will give authors more opportunity to connect directly with people who devour books through their eyes and ears. I know that our Audible listeners will love being able to meet their favorite authors and to have a personalized, autographed memento of that meeting.”

Also this week, Wattpad (“Unlimited Stories”) accompanies Margaret Atwood to Comic-Con, where she will interview SciFi author Rob Reid about his new novel, Year Zero, on a Fanado online stage. Allen Lau, CEO and Co-Founder of Wattpad, where Atwood is currently publishing original poetry and judging the Wattpad poetry contest aptly dubbed the “Attys”, explains: “There’s such a natural fit among everything that we do and everything Margaret does.”

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What's Up With Wattpad? Interesting!

Wattpad was launched in 2006...AND, I never really heard of it (or if I did I forgot about it) until yesterday! But, I miss a lot sometimes, maybe even more than sometimes...

This revealing report comes from Publishing Perspectives by Edward Nawotka:

In August, Wattpad published usage analytics for downloads and readers of the company’s ebooks. The report covers desktop usage, as well as some 1,000 different phone models from 600 carriers in 160 countries (excluding China).

• While English-language books and readers using smartphones remains the strongest segment, growth among Southeast Asian readers using Java-based feature phones is nearly as good and, argues Wattpad co-founder Allen Lau, has even more potential.

Canadian e-publisher Wattpad “aspires to be the YouTube of ebooks,” and has some 600,000 stories or e-book chapters available on its site, says company co-founder Allen Lau. In late August, Lau released statistics analyzing which devices its readers use to read Wattpad’s self-published ebooks, covering usage on desktops and some 1,000 different phone models from 600 carriers in 160 countries (excluding China, where traffic to the company’s site is blocked). The report covers traffic through the second quarter of this year, from April through June.

“We know it’s not 100% representative of the market,” said Lau, “but is an interesting snapshot, particularly for the younger demographic. We have users from teenagers to writers in their 70s, but 80% are under 25 and most of them are female.”

What is Wattpad?

Wattpad offers ebooks via it’s website www.wattpad.com, a mobile site (http://m.wattpad.com) and through Wattpad’s proprietary application that can run on Apple iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Java-enabled phones. According to its own data, the company delivers approximately one million downloads per month and has amassed nearly half a million readers since its launch in 2006.

The majority of Wattpad titles are downloadable as single chapters, typically of between two to twenty pages in length. The majority are written by self-published authors, though some traditional publishers have also begun experimenting with distribution through the site, which now include Macmillan’s sci-fi imprint Tor (available for the Android app) and Choose Your Own Adventure publisher Chooseco, among others.

The company is also in partnership with Smashwords.com and Lulu.com to provide marketing solutions to their authors in the US, and with Bubok.es, to do the same for its Spanish-speaking contributors.

To date, the most popular single title on the site has Dinner with a Vampire by Abigail Gibbs, which is available in more 50 chapters, which have been read in aggregate some eight million times (representing approximately a half a million total readers).

A majority of titles are in English, though there are hundreds of titles available in languages including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Malaysian, Romanian, Turkish, Czech, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Japanese and several others. The company is ad-support and advertising, through agreements with partner companies in the relevant countries, appears in the language native to where the book is being downloaded or read.

Read more http://alturl.com/9buch