A new chapter for authors

Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 2:42 PM

Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Associate Product Marketing Manager

As I wrote in our debut post, this blog is about discovery. For a reader, that discovery might be a great book. For a publisher, it might be new audiences for previously obscure backlist titles. And for an author, it could be a new chapter in a budding career.

Susan Foote, a first-time author who joined the Google Book Search Partner Program last year, has an especially inspiring story to tell. In 1998, she set sail on a 41-foot sailing ketch to fulfill a lifelong dream: seeing the world by boat. The trip took her all the way from Lake Erie, Ohio to the shores of Opua, New Zealand. It also inspired her to write a book so she could share her experiences with people who dream of doing the same thing.

The book sold above expectations when it was first published in 2002. But three years later, after Foote decided to include it in Book Search, she had a wave of new orders, and started getting email from readers she wasn’t able to reach before. Says Foote in her Book Search success story:

I get letters from people telling me how happy they are to have found my book, and how it's made a big difference in their lives -- very often from older women. As I point out in my book, there are many books written by men who convinced their loves to go cruising, but few books written by the loves who did it. I'm happy to know that by writing about the second chapter in my life, I'm inspiring other women to start their own.

Very cool. If you’re an author or want to learn more about how the Partner Program works for authors, we invite you to visit our Author Resources page.