Published.com — An Autobiography of a Dot.Com Born At the Dawn of the Internet
The Early Years
Much happened during the year of our birth in 1997. Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. Woolworths closed the last of its stores. Pre-teen girls were squealing at Hanson concerts. Search engines like Lycos and Prodigy were players. Everyone was using dial-up and it took forever to get online and do anything once there.
Into this world, we were born. A scrappy one-word domain name ready to make our mark on the world. We were a free directory where writers, artists, musicians and any other form of creative individual, could post their work and links to their websites. We eked out an existence mostly because of our name, but our once clean skin was damaged by Adsense ads, unsightly banner ads, and well, just bad design.
Finally a Grown Up
In 2009, after watching a lot of Intervention and Celebrity Rehab, we decided that we had to get serious about what we were doing with our life and become part of solution (okay, so that was a bit much).
From our own traffic statistics we discovered that there are millions of monthly online searches for various categories and genres of books. So, since January 2009, we’ve been preparing for our “ta-da!” moment when we could finally shout, “We are Published.com, hear us roar!” (Again, this was more powerful when Helen Reddy sang it).
We redesigned this site to:
- Help authors and publishers promote their books directly to readers, bloggers and reviewers;
- Engage book lovers in creative and fun ways so that they want to take chances on authors other than the ones the big chains and retailers want them to know about; and
- Get good books into the hands of reviewers and bloggers who want to review them.
We Know Who We Are
Unlike a lot of other websites, we aren’t posers or wannabes. We aren’t crazy (or have enough money) to think we’ll be a Facebook. We creatively help authors and publishers maximize their Facebook presence, but there is no chance that some random from your high school will find you on Published.com (unless of course they are searching for great books).
We aren’t trying to be Amazon or any other online retailer. We help authors and publishers get their books found so that they can provide links to such retailers on their Published.com profile pages.
Basically, we’ve built our company 100% from search engine optimization and a cost-effective online marketing strategy. We didn’t hire people to do it for us. We are good at it. Our sites rank high for the search terms important to us.
Our Future
Published.com will always be the mothership. Within the next year we will have another 20-30 genre specific book directories, where Published.com members will have the chance to promote their books too. You can find a list of those genres on the right portion of this page.