Blogging for Books

Over the past few months Tenfold has had the privilege of working with the folks at Waterbrook Multnomah Publishing on a huge project called Blogging for Books. As the name implies, bloggers can join the program, select books that they are interested in reading, be sent a copy of the book for free, and write a review about the book on their blog. Once the reader is done with that book they will be sent another. It’s a pretty good deal if you love to blog and want free books. (Who doesn’t want free books?)

This was a huge project and really less of a website than a custom online application. The back-end of the website is a very thoughtful and intentional, yet very confusing, matrix of fields databases and scripts. Tenfold’s programming partner Rocket Jones handled the complexity of the project beautifully.

The challenge with these projects from a design perspective is that everything that appears on the front-end of the website is dynamic data pulled from the back-end. The result is that we would design the framework in which the data would sit, but we wouldn’t know exactly what that data would look like until the site went live. It’s a little bit like designing in a dark room with your sunglasses on, but it also makes for a very exciting launch of the site when you get to see it come together for the first time.

Blogging for Books is still in beta, but the program is up and running with great early success. Within 3 hours of being posted, the site had 100 bloggers signed up and the posts were flying.