iAuthor, the book discovery platform, launches LitSampler 2.0 today. Here iAuthor’s founder, Adam Kolczynski, tells us more.

What is LitSampler 2.0?

LitSampler 2.0 is iAuthor’s book sampling tool. An industry-first, it allows authors and publishers to upload an enticing excerpt of their book, controlled from their iAuthor dashboard. Readers can try before they buy, decreasing their inbuilt risk aversion to a new book by an unknown author.

Wendy Corsi Staub, a New York Times bestseller with more than 4 million book sales worldwide, has a created a sample here: https://www.iauthor.uk.com/chapter/the-perfect-stranger:5758

For a more image-centric sample, dive into https://www.iauthor.uk.com/chapter/the-secret-life-of-scones:8660

How is LitSampler 2.0 unique?

LitSampler 2.0 brings the point of book discovery nearer the point of purchase. For authors? An ultra-intuitive typographical tool to showcase their books. For readers? An immersive e-reader. We asked ourselves what the ideal sampling tool should do. It should be responsive, allowing effortless sampling on all screen-sizes. It should be formattable, giving authors and publishers the power to lay out their books exactly as they wish, complete with indents, drop-caps, section breaks, images, tables and more. It should be shareable, so readers can harness their global network to maximise author discoverability. It should be embeddable, so book samples can travel to any site or blog with just one line of HTML. It should be browser-centric, so the sampling process won’t require downloading software or files. We believe that iAuthor’s reimagined sampling tool covers all of the above, and elegantly completes the “Browse-Sample-Buy” discovery funnel.

From a UX/UI perspective, we felt that many existing book samplers were decidedly awkward. An over-reliance on skeuomorphic elements rooted the design in the pre-iPad era, page navigation was unintuitive, and reader-centric features such as in-line search, bookmarking and contrast control weren’t optimised for mobile. At iAuthor, we believe that design should be invisible to the user. Book excerpts should take centre-stage, not toolbars, bloated menus or banner adverts. Ideally: all signal, no noise. By minimising visual clutter, LitSampler 2.0 not only increases reader dwell-time, but enhances the quality of that engagement.

Featured in The Bookseller, Digital Book World and GalleyCat, Adam Kolczynski is best known for iAuthor, the London-based startup. In tackling the perennial problem of book discoverability, Kolczynski has straddled both ends of the publishing spectrum: first as an author, then as a publisher with Polybius Books.