In a time when social media platforms like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have become virtually indispensable for promoting and marketing books, wouldn’t it be great if you could push a button and get a complete rundown on what books people are talking about online—positive and negative comments—maybe even get exact quotes? CoverCake is a startup technology platform that claims to be able to do all that and more.
Launched by two Silicon Valley technology veterans, Sujee Maniyam and Brian Sathianathan, CoverCake offers the ability to track vast amounts of data across multiple social media platforms and deliver an aggregate score of the total number of comments being made about a book or even track the popularity of genres as well as publishers or authors. The technology can retrieve data on conversations around a book made on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.com, Goodreads, and YouTube and provide an impressive range of detail. CoverCake delivers the data in the form of color-coded graphs and pie-charts, and users can even retrieve specific comments and even customer reviews on Amazon.
CoverCake business development director Todd Gibson said the company has signed a deal with Books-A-Million to use the CoverCake technology to enhance its merchandising and customers’ shopping. He says CoverCake is talking to both publishers and booksellers about how to integrate CoverCake into their businesses. “You can see who is talking about a book,” Gibson said. “You can measure the effectiveness of marketing or see spikes from negative comments and work to abate them. We think it’s the holy grail of social analytics.” The technology can be used by individuals like authors ($50 a month) or companies ($800 a month to start), and CoverCake is in talks with publishers looking to offer their authors more data about their books. “We’re engineers, so we’ve built a tool that is flexible and scalable,” Gibson said, and it can be integrated into existing services.”
The accompanying graphs showing monthly aggregate mentions are only one example of multiple ones generated for any book. These graphs chart the total number of times the book has been mentioned across all social media channels.
