Ferol Vernon is the COO of Written Word Media and has built technology for everyone from doctors and combat medics to musicians and now authors. Ferol’s focus is building deeply engaging technology for readers, and effective ad products for authors and publishers. Here we interviewed him on Freebooksy and Bargain Boosky, both part of the Written Word Media Family. 

1) What exactly are Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy?

Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy are book deal sites. Freebooksy features only free books has 213,000 registered readers and Bargain Booksy features books that are priced under $5, and has 160,000 registered readers. Readers save their genre preferences as well as reading device preferences so our daily newsletter is extremely targeted, and the books we feature sell lots of copies.

2) What problem do they solve?

Two problems really. Readers are always looking for their next great book, but not everyone wants to pay full price, so we offer book deal alerts to readers. We help them find a great book, in the genre they want, for a price that can’t be beat. The second problem we solve is for authors, who are always looking for a place to promote their book. Our advertising products are very effective, and extremely affordable. Authors who promote with us see tangible results, and they keep coming back.

3) What do they offer for publishers?

The service we offer to publishers is the same service we offer to authors. Our advertising works so well, some of the biggest publishers on earth use us. We strive to make sure the same promo tools that work for major publishing houses, are available to indie authors as well.

4) What has been your greatest success?

We’re really most proud of our reputation among the author community. We genuinely care about our authors, and it shows in how we run our business. We know authors want great customer service, so we make it a priority. There’s real people here answering emails every day, and customer service is the first thing we talk about in our weekly staff meeting.

5) What challenges do you face?

Big goals are always challenging and at Written Word Media we have big goals. We want to provide the world’s best  promotional services for authors and that means constantly finding new audiences of readers. Our strategy is to build brands that cater to specific reader types, we’ve branched out from just Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy, and launched two new sites. NewInBooks is all about the latest, hottest books, and more in-depth content about books. Red Feather Romance is a romance-specific site. Both of those sites were built to offer a new type of reader to our authors. Continuing to create new brands to attract new readers is challenging, but we’re up to the task.

6) What will be next for Written Word Media?

Like I mentioned we’re highly focused on finding readers and building great ad products for authors. That strategy has served us well and we’re not abandoning it, look for continued expansion form us in in the coming months!