BookRiff

In a recent post on turner-riggs blogspace about the troubling task of creating a effective brand that every new start-up faces, Kiley Turner points to BookRiff as one example of a site that gracefully overcomes the challenge. BookRiff’s task, according to Turner: “Convey a very cool but rather complicated idea as simply as possible so visitors don’t lose interest/get confused/feel it’s too complicated and navigate away from the site.”

For BookRiff, one of our goals from the beginning has been to create a site that’s not only innovative but that’s also fun to use and accessible to everyone. Because we are introducing a new way of working with print media, this means we’ve had to be extra cautious in the way we introduce ourselves to the world. We want folks to be intrigued, but not afraid. Also, because BookRiff is meant to be an open platform whose community will help define it through their own uses of the tools, we’re careful not to be so directive as to hamper creativity. This creates an additional challenge for us because we want people to know how to use the basic tools; we just don’t want them to stop there.

In other ways, it is easy to talk about BookRiff simply, because while there’s a complex set of machinery beneath the user interface that makes book-building possible, the basic idea is just this: build your own book. Choose your own chapters, order them, and add anything else into your Riff to make it yours.

Likewise, from a content provider’s point of view, BookRiff introduces an entirely new publishing business model, along with a new way of thinking about the value of book (and other print media) content,  but the process is easy. As a “Creator”, you choose how your content is split up and viewed, you choose its price, and we don’t touch your revenue.

Establishing a brand to present BookRiff as a simple, useful tool for both consumers and creators is really the icing on a larger effort to make those messages ring true through every aspect of BookRiff. From the business model, to the site navigation, to the printing and shipment of books…

It’s nice to hear that we’re doing an o.k. job so far, but we’ve got our work cut out for us in the coming months. Beta testers, send us your thoughts!