Good afternoon my little extra servings of sugar in a cup of tea, I’ll be popping off for a couple of weeks for a minor operation but never fear – here is a guest post by Matt Stephens about his new website, a kind of virtual book trailer thing. He’ll explain it much better than I can. Anyway, here is his post:
“Since online shopping began, I’ve felt that discovering and buying books on the Internet is a rather clinical experience, not really befitting the fact that I’m buying escapist novels. So, almost a year ago to the day, I quit my day job and set out to create Inkflash.com – a Virtual Reality book discovery site.
Inkflash has evolved into a book marketing hub for authors to promote their books in themed 3D rooms. The site launched just a month ago. Authors have already begun signing up to have a themed “author room” created for them (we’re adding new rooms every day). The rooms are designed to evoke the world or period that the books are set in; the effect is like an interactive book trailer that you can step into and walk around in.
The magical element is that all of this works in your web browser, so anyone can visit the site and explore new literary worlds in 3D. Visitors can browse for murder mysteries in virtual recreations of Victorian London, or find perfect books for Winter in a snow-laden park where the only sound is the crunch of their footsteps.
Rooms are linked via doorways, so visitors to the site can wander from one room to the next, exploring books and discovering new authors as they go. Although Inkflash is still very new, it’s already shaping organically into different “neighbourhoods” of historical novelists, science fiction authors, romance authors and so forth.
Each author room can also show book trailers up on a big “video wall”, plus Twitter and blog feeds. It’s all interactive, so you can click on anything in the room and (for example) link through to your website or a book’s Amazon page.
I hope you’ll agree that Inkflash makes shopping for books on the Web more fun and engaging than a “point and click” ecommerce site. It’s also great for authors who want to make their books really stand out from the crowd. If you’re an author (aspiring or published), I hope you’ll join us on Inkflash very soon!”
Based in London, Matt Stephens is the owner and co-founder of Inkflash, and founder of indie Historical Fiction publisher Fingerpress. Before that he spent 20 years as a software developer, mainly in finance, and wrote some books on software design.
Authors who’d like a virtual room on Inkflash should contact Matt without delay, at: matt@inkflash.com
Madeleine Swann 