Saturday, June 07, 2008

The Months is now on Looky Book and Big Universe

I recently learned from my friend and PBJ cohort Ali that my book "The Months" is on BigUniverse.com. Big Universe is a site with the same functionality as Looky Book - they both allow you to flip through a (printed and published) picture book ONLINE - - start to finish, end papers, title page, grey matter, the whole shebang, AND, at a size that's eyeball-friendly, too (nice and big)! So cool. Anyway, she clued me in on this last week. I was so excited about it that I promply put a link to the book on Big Universe in my blog sidebar (over there >>>).

Then, someone else told me the other day that "The Months" is ALSO on Looky Book! I had no idea - honestly, I don't know what the criteria is to get your book on one of these sites and what kind of red tape there is (if any). Since I knew that "The Months" was already on Big Universe, I figured we would not be on Looky Book anytime soon, if at all. (Can't really articulate why I thought that was the case -- I mean, Borders and Barnes and Noble carry the same books... so why not Big Universe and Looky Book? Makes sense... ) So I am pretty excited about this as well!! I know that Looky Book is pretty well-known so it's nice to have the book in another avenue for potential eyeballs and page-flips. (Saturation - we like that!!)

Check out both of these sites if you get a chance, not necessarily to see MY book ;) but just to see how they house the content (for YOUR OWN book, or your future book, or your friend's book).

Looky Book has a really nice book template for your books, which is encased IN-page (no pop-up windows here). Looky Book's overall design features lots of white space, so the focus is really ON the book you are viewing. (That's nice. I like it.)

Big Universe has a different-looking shell -- it's colorful and themey (the header features an outer-space illustration). A couple of the button/icon graphics are space-themed as well. When you click on the link to view the book, a pop-up window opens that is sized to the books' viewable area. To further speak to the space theme: when you click to view a book, you first get a cute animation loader ("Please wait - just a minute") that features a travelling martian in a UFO.

Check them out, compare and contrast, but be happy that there are now TWO-TWO-TWO places for your picture books to be seen, in their entirety, on the web! :) Horray!!

5 comments:

Archie and Melissa said...

Hi Kathy!
Congratulations! How exciting! Thank you for showing both of those sites. I did not know about them. Very cool!
Melissa

Anonymous said...

I checked them out. That is very cool to have a preview of the book to see if you want to buy it. Although, aren't you worried about someone screen capturing the copyrighted materials anyway?

Unknown said...

Hi Kim!

Not really. They can print it, but they'll get a lot of smudgey art.

Alicia PadrĂ³n said...

It looks awesome in Looky Book too! Even better, right? I really like the design of that site. :o)

Unknown said...

Ali - yah, me too!

I can't knock Big U, y'know, because they had "The Months" up before Looky did.. ;) But, aethetically, I totally agree with you.