NetGalley, the Firebrand subsidiary offering prepublication digital book galleys to booksellers, librarians, and reviewers, has launched Booktrovert.com, a consumer-facing marketing platform and website offering e-book giveaways, reader activities, promotional and preorder campaigns, book sales, and more.
"Booktrovert is our answer to the book industry's demand for robust consumer marketing tools," Lindsey Lochner, NetGalley president, said in a press release announcing the new platform. "By leveraging NetGalley's established technology, plus our decades of experience in community building and reader engagement metrics, Booktrovert offers publishers and authors a direct way to connect with a significantly wider audience and build excitement around their books."
Booktrovert will function as a separate brand under the NetGalley umbrella, targeting general readers rather than industry professionals. "We want the NetGalley community to remain as professional as we can, while the Booktrovert community can be everyone and their mother," Kristina Radke, SVP of business growth and engagement for NetGalley and Booktrovert, told PW.
Publishers can create campaigns through a self-service interface within their NetGalley accounts, featuring single or multiple books with options for public or private distribution, and receive customer analytics and demographic data.
The platform will offer giveaways, preorder campaigns, and purchase links, with e-book fulfillment handled through NetGalley's existing distribution through Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and its proprietary web reader and app. Physical book purchases can be made through links to Amazon, B&N.com, and Bookshop.org; audiobooks are being fulfilled through Audiobooks.com, Libro.fm, Kobo or whichever retail sites the publisher chooses; and Booktrovert swag is available through Threadless.
The launch of Booktrovert puts gives NetGalley the opportunity to compete with Amazon’s Goodreads—a platform many in the industry feel has been stagnant, if not outright toxic—particularly as traditional book reviewing has evolved, with online influencers now promoting e-books primarily on such social media platforms as TikTok. "We see influencers holding up their phones and e-reading devices, really, just like they would have a book,” Angela Bole, CEO of Firebrand, told PW, “and those are the people that publishers want to reach—and, by extension, the people who follow the influencers.”
The company plans to leverage its existing NetGalley membership for initial Booktrovert promotion while expanding through acquisition campaigns and online advertising. The platform, Bole said, represents NetGalley's effort to capitalize on publisher demand for consumer marketing tools while maintaining its established professional platform—and, she added, “publishers have been asking for this for a long time.”