Future Think: Bookigee's WriterCube

If you’re struggling with just what the relatively new concept of the "entrepreneurial author" means, there's nobody better to ask than Bookigee founding CEO Kristen McLean.

"With the quickly evolving publishing landscape," McLean says, "more and more opportunities and decision-making power is being placed in the hands of authors, but we haven't created professional tools or trustworthy sources of high-quality information to help them take advantage of this shift."

One of the reasons McLean is so appreciated by writers is that she speaks truth to power when the time comes. “No one in the traditional model is really incentivized to help authors,” she says, “either because they are focusing on their own business-model shift, or because they don't understand what authors need.”

And so McLean’s company Bookigee has created WriterCube, a tool that features a massive Book Marketing Database and more. Bookigee, the parent company, has “several areas we work on in addition to tools for authors,” says McLean.

"We do market research on book consumers, and we work with publishers and technology companies like app developers to create new kinds of data products and services."

What's in the Book Marketing Database at WriterCube? Here are just some of the listings:

• Independent bookstores in the US—1,113 of them
  Libraries in every US state: with 294 in Alabama, 465 listing in Massachusetts and 286 in Nebraska
• Reviewers and Major Media—including listings for AM radio shows, news service syndicates and 461 reviewers
• Professional Services—in the "author services" space, this features book packagers, cover designers and publicity resources
• Top Twitter Influencer broken down by author tweets, independent bookstore and industry tweets

There's also instructional material on marketing, self-publishing, branding and other critical topics.

A familiar featured speaker on the publishing conference scene, McLean joins Frankfurt Book Fair’s CONTEC Conference on October 8 in a special panel, “Big Data/Small Data,” with Bowker metadata specialist Laura Dawson and Sebastian Posth of Berlin’s Publishing Data Networks. And she’ll be on the road at many points in the fall and winter, presenting and debating issues in publishing’s digital dynamic, while developing WriterCube’s unique suite of services for authors.