Early Ink
So here’s a question:
What do you think of this site?
http://www.earlyink.com/
It just went up at 6PM ET today (Sunday) so you’ll be some of the first checking it out.
More than you ever wanted to hear from Jenny Crusie.
So here’s a question:
What do you think of this site?
http://www.earlyink.com/
It just went up at 6PM ET today (Sunday) so you’ll be some of the first checking it out.
I’ve been waiting for this since I heard about it over on Smart Bitches, and I have to say it was worth the wait.
As a reader, I love that a get a “virtual” look and feel because I have the first chapter to read, a synopsis and even comments from other readers. I wish I could see the back cover or inside cover copy too, but maybe that’s just me.
It just helps me have a more thorough virtual experience.
As I writer, I love that I can link it to my website, blog, or whatever. I like that if I have a book trailer, I can post it here. I forgot to check, but will the trailers be linked to the same page as the book? What am I saying, I’m sure Mollie has thought of that! I just liked that this could be a really cost effective bang for my limited advertising/marketing buck.
Way to go chickies, I think you’ve got another home run!
Excellent. Very sophisticated and fun.
It’s easy to navigate and I’d definitely return.
Love the av club and the media buzz.
My only suggestion, as a first time viewer and navigating around the site, how about removing popular themes aspect at the bottom, or making it smaller type and highlighting more the av and media buzz? The way it is now, the splash page is a bit busy. Just my opinion, feel free to totally ignore it, I’m just being honest about my feelings. *grin*
EarlyInk is amazing. I can’t wait to root around in it some more. Thanks for the heads up!
I’ve been hearin the buzz on this for a bit now and am so happy to finally see it live-
I love the AV end- like the trailers or teasers or whatever they’re called in bookland
It’s easy to navigate, and I could find what I wanted- just as importantly when I got someplace I found what I expected to find based on the heading
I agree that the popular themes is a bit crowded- can it be made into a window/graphic that can pop open when you click on it- it almost overpowers the New Fiction and New Non-Fiction sections
(grumps) Kind of short on the fantasy and science fiction, aren’t they?
OTOH, it’s nice to have all this stuff in one place. Do they get their excerpts/info from the publishers or from the writers themselves?
What I would like to see is some sort of “if you like this, you may also like XYZ by Jane Doe.” Don’t know how accurate they could get though, unless they actually polled people about the books they’ve bought and liked.
Interesting site, though. (-: I think I’ll go tell them a couple of authors they are missing.
Only OK. Has potential. The choices on the top are quite irritating in that the same books turn up multiple times.
OTOH, if some work were done on the choices (probably keywords or some such) in the region below the new books, it could be quite useful.
That is, have those choices in some sort of table so that clicking boxes shows how many hits. Then click a goto button to see the listings of those books that were hit. Aw, heck. Example: Screenful of choices. I click romance and 57 is displayed. I also then click mystery, and the 57 becomes a 45. I click the goto button and the 45 novels that are categorized as both romance and mystery are displayed.
I can then click on any of those and get details. Or start over.
Beautifully laid out - very clean and easy to scan, easy to understand right off the bat. I think I’d go back, particularly if there’s a way to personalize so that I can quickly find the types of books I’m most interested in, a la Amazon’s “you might like this” thing. In other words, well done Mollie!
I like it and I’ll be back.
Three observations that might make it a bit more user friendly: I just clicked on the link and didn’t know what to expect, so it actually took me a minute or so to figure out what I was looking at. I assume book sellers will have a better idea, and probably most readers, but someone who just goes clicks a link without much idea of where it is headed might not know why they are there. I didn’t see the title up at the top right away.
Also, on the first page I can see the covers of four books, but I cannot make out the titles on two, and frankly, my impulse was to click on the covers that interested me to learn more, rather than to look at the titles below. Guess that says something about the way my brain is oriented. So, maybe all the books being previewed should have a cover, and one that links to the description as well. (I stil have to go back and see what the books are.)
Finally, the “more” button takes me to the second page, but doesn’t take me anywhere else — perhaps it should be a “back” button on the second page?
I like the look of the site and think the features are nice.
I liked it a lot. I agree with the comments above. But I might add that I liked being linked to the author’s website, so that I could see what else he or she wrote and about the author in general.
Also liked the link to booksellers so I can just order it if I want.
Very nicely laid out and tech-tarded friendly!
An irrelevant note: I just found a brilliant dictionary site and am over the moon about it. For anyone else here writing fantasy where a character’s speech patterns often need an archaic slant, this is incredibly useful!
Word or phrase search: http://www.onelook.com/
‘Find many words given only part of a definition or related concepts’: http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
As someone who sits with a thesaurus at her elbow, this is going to be fantastic!
Just had to share *g*
Ooh. Shiny. I haven’t poked around yet but I think it’s a good idea. I mean, I do this already with review and author websites. This will hopefully make things easier in finding books that I’m likely to enjoy.
I like it. It’s about time something like this was created.
I love that there are RSS feeds…so handy. Will be back to have a proper look around eventually!
So this is what my son’s been doing!! *g*
It looks great — and fills a publishing need. Let’s hope it’s a great hit all around.
I like the clean look, the intuitive nav. Playful elements like the theme cloud are fun, and am looking forward to the blog (not sure if it is the same as the Media Buzz page and how it will differ from the current blog for A/V Club).
The most important thing for me is going to be the quality of the reviews. If this is another rah-rah site, with blurbs from the PR Machine, then it won’t be as useful/interesting to me as a site with smart, insightful reviews of books. So I’m crossing my fingers for future smart-i-tde.
Wonderful site! As a regular user, I would immediately check out Popular Themes first each time I check in, so I think it’s important to get that section exactly right. My only (minor) concern with it: are the fonts in Popular Themes supposed to be different sizes to make the categories easier to distinguish from each other visually? Like “essays” is really big compared to everything else, and a couple of other words are different sizes. Varying font sizes can look cool and artsy, which I like because it’s important to me how things “look,” but different size fonts can also give the impression that one category is more “important” than others. The problem I think is that there’s not enough variation in the font size in Popular Themes to look like it’s a purposeful design choice rather than an accident of typing. Also, about Popular Themes, it seems like an index to me, and scanning across (rather than vertically) is hard on my eyes. I would prefer a vertical listing or–if you’re going to stay horizontal–a listing that separates the categories more so I can see them better, which may be what the design team was trying to do by varying that font size a little!!! I’m not sure, but overall, it looks great. I look forward to checking this site out on a regular basis.
I had not heard the “buzz” (I’m a writer, I don’t get out much) so I wasn’t sure at first what I was looking at. But what a great idea! Obviously it’s still new with more to come, but the site has great bones. Clean, clear, easy to navigate.
What an amazing daughter you have, Jenny. Isn’t it nice when your kid hangs out with talented creative types who do good things? You both have cause to be proud of this effort. Congratulations!
Thanks for the link. I Just subscribed to three of the offered feeds (romance, mystery, and suspense/thriller). It was interesting that Nora Roberts new book was top on all three feeds, but I’m looking forward to seeing new book arrivals.
I like it. The downside of reading reviews by newspaper columnists is the reviews are colored by their own preferences and prejudices and too often they ignore popular fiction. One site that lets you check out upcoming books without slugging through biases is refreshing. I’m not sure to what extent the popular themes section is helpful. Perhaps more so as the site grows. I’m guessing that various themes become more prominent based on each viewers browsing history?
Way to go, Mollie & Co. Thanks for looking out for all us Readers.
Fix double apostrophe in “Tell others what we’re doing here if you think we”re worthy.”
Again, fabulous site. I like that readers can leave comments on books you feature.
At the top of Media Buzz:
“Bill Geist has taken 20 ears of adventures…”
Add the Y to years
I hope it’s okay I’m writing in with tiny edits. I used to do this for a living, and it’s so fun for me (which sounds like I’m a horrible person because I’m trying to find mistakes!!!).
Same line at top of Media Buzz
“…CBS News Sunday Moring…”
Add N to morning
This is my last one. I’ve never seen a Web address rendered this way:
“…send an email to cameron(at)earlyink(dot)com.”
It sounds like a good idea, but it seems to be down.
Very Cool. Good work Mollie.
I just have one comment. I’m like JulieB. As a visual learner, I go for the pictures. When I saw a book cover, I expected to be able to click it and link to that book’s stuff. I did eventually find the fine print underneath with the highligted “click-spot”.
Thanks for the link Jenny.
I think it’s an excellent idea. I’m really hoping it takes off.
Kieran - this email version won’t let search machines find your email address (see post concerning spammers) because they can’t find the @ symbol. Whereas smart people like blog commenters know how to do it.
(By the way, I am a mistake scout too because I have to do a lot of proof-reading for my job.)
I like the idea of the site. And to think it comes almost parallel to my discovery of the St Martins press “read it first” service that sends you the beginning of a new book every week! That’s cool too if you skip the long introduction.
i really love the idea. needs more books :), but it’s a great start. i’m curious how often they take out old books (after three months, five, etc?), but i found a new author already so…i really like the set-up.
colognegrrl: what press “read it first” thing?
Okay, generally I’m a lurker here. Maybe even a slurker? But I do read this blog religiously. Not to mention they way I re-re-read Jenny’s books.
Anyway, I clicked on to this new website and was a little confused. I looked around a little and wondered “How is this going to help me?” I suppose it’s kind of like looking around on the bookstore shelves before the books come out?
To make it more useful to me, I would suggest a couple of things:
1. The list of themes is already too long…maybe make them sort buttons?
2. The ability to sort by author. The title of the book appears WAY more important than the author, but let’s face it we buy most books because of who wrote it, not necessarily the themes. (Especially spendy new hardcover books.)
3. A way to feel good (confident) about trying someone or something new. I like the idea of the “also loveds” in the comments box. Also, Jenny’s caveat about blurbs aside, if an author I like “likes” a book, I’m more likely to try it.
You did say you wanted my opinion right? Thanks for asking!
Oh, she wants all of the opinions, and thank you all so much for taking the time to give them. It’s tremendously helpful.
This, by the way, is not one of my sites. It’s Mollie’s with her staff. She knew that I got terrific feedback whenever I posted a question here, so she asked me to post about the site, and you’ve come through for her beautifully. She wants to know all of this.
Thank you so much.
I really like the site; great idea for bringing together information about books in a variety of genres.
I’m a big fan of the popular themes tags and like to navigate a site using the thematic keywords.
My personal opinion is that I would prefer to have the author’s name as well as the book title in the AV section where it lists ‘new video’ and ‘new audio’. As I think someone else mentioned earlier a lot of people look for a book by author name rather than title and the title can be meaningless as an identifier.
OH - if you go to stmartins.com and click on Read-it-first, you can register for a week-daily email presenting the beginning of a book - five instalments per week, to get a feel for it.
Which is a great exercise for this week’s HWSW lesson on beginnings, as is the earlyink.com page. I just read the new Nora Roberts. I’m sorry but I just can’t warm up to her, especially if she deals with psychology. The story starts with a police specialist talking a suicidal guy down from a roof. Wow, is she successful - every question is right on target, and within five minutes, the guy wants to live again.(Since it’s a NR novel, it’s only the introduction to the real story where the specialist will fall in love with the hero who happens to be the poor guy’s landlord.) But reading the dialogue, it sounds like they put an actor on the roof who answered on cue to all the heroine’s attempts on saving him. Might make a great story, too, once she finds out about that. (Her colleagues trying to teach her a lesson? Some evil opponent playing a trick on her??) But of course it’s not April Fool’s Day but St Patrick’s Day, the heroine has her own issues why she chose that job, and I will not buy the book to find out. Thank you, earlyink.com.
I’ve enjoyed poking around the site and I’m sure I’ll go back often. I really like the clean lines and easy to read font.
It’s so weird that on one computer in my house, the Popular Themes keywords are different sized fonts, but on the other house computer (on the same network), the font is all the same size. So I guess the font thing I noticed earlier must be something to do with my computer. I’m sorry. Part of me wishes I understood why the site looks different on my two computers. And the other part of me says, Don’t go there! Don’t go into Mystery Computer Land because you might never come out!
No, they’re supposed to be different sizes. The most frequent tags are bigger than the less frequent. That way you get them in alphabetical order with the size to flag which ones are on there the most.
Other than that, I have no idea what’s happening with your computer. But you have all my sympathy.
Kieran: you probably have your display settings on your second computer set to override any site’s default fonts.
Things I love about this site:
- The idea. As an almost manic book buyer, and a picky reader to boot, having easy access to book excerpts is worth its weight in gold to me. Being able to go to one site to find this stuff: priceless.
-The clean interface. I do this stuff for a living, so I’ve got pretty strong opinions on good site/UI design. earlyink is well laid out and easy to browse, which is rarer than you’d think.
Things I’d like to see improved (brace yourself; some of this is kind of technical):
- The font choice. This is a site, like newspapers and blogs, that relies primarily on printed text as a content-delivery mechanism, and which will be read on a screen and not printed out. The upshot of this is that an easily-readable screen font should be chosen—a font with a tall x-height, a wide punch-width, and wide letter-spacing. And taking into consideration what the average user is likely to have, this leaves you with basically three choices: Georgia in the serif family, and Verdana and Trebuchet in the sans-serif family; a limiting choice, to be sure, but readability is paramount. It looks like Arial or something like it is being used on the site now, and I personally find that the letters are too narrow in Arial. I would find it easier to read were Verdana or Trebuchet used as the primary text font of the site.
- Font size. I’d like to see the size of the text in the long passages be bumped up to 11 or 12pt. Save the 9 and 10pt fonts for the sidebars.
- Line spacing. I think right now it’s a little too large. Increasing the font size a bit will help to mitigate this, but maybe the line-height can be reduced to around 1.2 or 1.3?
- Don’t justify. While justifying the text makes for clean lines in terms of page layout, justified text is much harder to read (see #2 on the page) than left-aligned text. To preserve the clean lines of the layout if left-alignment is used, perhaps some light-grey vertical rules could be used as section separators ?
- Make the content of the excerpt page narrower. If the text block is very wide, the reader is more likely to lose her place. My personal opinion is that long blocks of text should never be more than 500px wide. The width used on the overview page is just about perfect, IMO.
Hope this helps.
Hi Jenny,
I really enjoyed the site. It’s very easy to navigate, which is key. Nothing negative jumped out at me.
Awesome job.
Sorry, Richa, you got caught in the spam filter and I have NO idea why. I despammed the one that had the most text in it, but I still have the others if you want those up, too. I think they’re duplicates but I’m not trashing them until you say so.
I love Akismet but every now and then . . .
My theory on this is that the problem was with me having links (to some reference articles) in my comment, and Akismet has a threshold for how many links can be in a comment (evidently, no more than one) before it gets sent to the spam comments list. As for which ones to keep, please keep the first one that you let through: the one with the timestamp of 7:17 PM. You’re free to delete the later ones that I was able to post in two parts, with timestamps of 7:19 and 7:25 PM, respectively, as well as the other ones caught in the spam net.
Thanks, and sorry for all the fuss!
Excellent!!!
Well, I like fonts, so I have to chime in. I like the font in the logo and as headers. I also like the color combinations. I have to agree that in the text underneath the books it’s a bit too small, especially when it’s in blue for the hyperlinks. But I do not like the Trebuchet font in the Poynter article. I think the whole Poynter article looks awful, the headers are clunky and the text looks too “busy” to read. In fact, I only skimmed it the first time, because I thought it looked like too much effort to bother with. The whole article looked “icky” to me. How’s that for a professional opinion?
I know that the size is also probably a factor of getting more books on the page, so I know Molly will probbly be finessing that as it develops.
I also agree with Raina on the excerpt width, something I hadn’t looked at before. It is a bit wide, although it doesn’t seem wider than the excepts on Jenny’s site, so maybe the fact that those pages used Georgia had something to do with the ease of reading.
I see that we can click on the book image and go to the related book — Yay! I could not make out “The Cleaner” as the title, so I never would have found it otherwise. The same is true for “Hundred Years.”
Finally, I have to agree with the other sentiments that the farther we can see into the future, the better. It’s like a little crystal ball. . .
@JulieB: I think my problem with the Poynter site in general is that they use like 5 different fonts on a page: Arial or some sans-serif derivative, Verdana, Trebuchet, Times or some serif derivative, and who knows what else. What’s more, the various sidebars (Three! Who needs three sidebars?) use a hodgepodge of font sizes and colors, with little discernible organization. All in all, the whole site is confusing and too busy; the eye doesn’t know where to go. They may know what they’re talking about when it comes to readibility, but good UI designers they are not.
When it comes to using fonts on websites, I’m a firm believer that less is more. Pick one or two and stick to ‘em.
All that said, I think you can design a good site using Trebuchet (here’s one). Notice the clean lines, uncluttered page, and ease of navigation and reading. But I agree with you that under a certain font size, Trebuchet becomes very hard to read and a bit too “busy”.
Oh, minus 5 points for me for misspelling “readability”. I do humbly apologize.
I liked it quite a bit. I really liked the idea that readers can leave comments about the books. It’s clean and easy to read, as well as super easy to navigate.
EEWWWWWW!!!! Did I really just say SUPER EASY???? Who am I, Marcia Freakin’ Brady?
We love your enthusiasm, Marcia.
Looks nice - but who is doing the reviews? Everyday folk or paid reviewers?
How much promotion is actually going to be in here? Lots of folks are already on their favorite authors websites/mailing lists. And alot of this info is available from your local bookstore - online or brick and from your library…
Clean and succinct. I like the cross-referencing, too. Very nice.
On a similar topic, I like the preview for comments on this page. So very fun to watch my words appear underneath my post. It’s almost hypnotic.
Richa, Sheesh — 5 points for spelling? I’m probably in the hole by now. . .
I did like the other example, although it was still a bit small for me. OTOH, I know my prescription is off in my new glasses, so now that I think about it, that may be my problem.
Jamie, don’t worry, we all think you’re groovy.
I looked at this a few days ago but wanted to let it roll around in my head for a while before I commented. Several people asked where the reviews came from and I’m with them–wanting to who is talking to me. So maybe that should be noted clearly. If you read review in Publishers Weekly or Hornbook, each review has the reviewer’s initials and you know they come from paid staff, for example.
I liked that you could look at one book’s review and then click on links to find other books on similar topics.
Will the site be limited to popular fiction or will it eventually include nonfiction and children’s books? And what about books with crossover interest, like Harry Potter? Not that we need more HP hype, but you see what I’m saying.
Overall, it’s beautiful. Loved the staff “photos”.
Golly gee, thanks you guys! I really do love the site though. Great job Mollie! A few kinks that others have already mentioned, but nothing that can’t be fixed.
In one write up they describe someone as a “rouge CIA agent” which I am assuming is a CIA agent working at the Clinque counter down at Macys.
They ought to have a proofreader go over the site.
Other than that, it’s a nice site and useful. I enjoyed the first chapters of all the books.
Okay - my two cents. I’m totally your audience for this site. I love the idea. I buy hardcovers the day they come out for all my favorite authors. My house will sink under their weight at some point, but it will be worth it. I really don’t like that the date that shows on the main page next to the entries is the date of the post, not the release date. What I would really love would be a calendar that shows me authors & titles on the release date - then I could quit haunting the 20 some sites I now check periodically and organizing the
info on my calendar program. In fact, if I’m dreaming big, I’d like to be able to sign up to get an email from the site for any author I’ve checked as being interested in (and not get spammed from Amazon on crap I’m not interested in at all).
But that might be going too far. Just don’t taunt me with a 5/23 date on Agnes and the Hitman, have me think
“I didn’t know that was out already - I have to go home early, buy it, and ignore the family for the next 4-5 hours,” when really I won’t get to read it for months.
“I didn’t know that was out already - I have to go home early, buy it, and ignore the family for the next 4-5 hours,” when really I won’t get to read it for months.
Yeah, this is exactly what I wrote to Mollie saying — it was cruel to be taunted with such a great chapter and then I could not go get the book already. Pre-orders should hit the roof with that chapter out there, though.