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Carol Fitzgerald's job in the Condé Nast magazine empire was marketing director for Mademoiselle. She had all the glitzy perks of the upper rungs on the New York publishing ladder: the corner office overlooking Madison Avenue, the Four Seasons-sized expense account.
After 17 years of organizing fashion shows and ski promotions, Fitzgerald says, "I just couldn't put together one more media kit with feeling."
Now she's doing what she loves: telling smart people about the books they should be reading. And she's built a healthy little online empire doing it. After three years of residency on America Online, Fitzgerald's empire -- called the Book Report Network -- is expanding to the Web.
Next month, a new site for teens called Teenreads.com will join Bookreporter.com and Kidsreads.com online, completing a package of sites featuring interviews with authors, features on publishing, and book-related polls.
It's no accident that each site targets a particular age group. Fitzgerald learned from the slick-page domain that owning a reader for life means pulling them in young and following up with a publication pitched to adults.
The network funnels all its e-commerce clicks to Amazon.com and is moving hundreds of thousands of books a year.
Fitzgerald, however, has chosen not to employ some of the gambits other book sites use to marshal eyeballs, things like overhyped celebrity-author chats. She would rather maintain high editorial standards on the sites and grow a loyal community.
"You don't get to look deeply at an author's work because America is having a press conference with them. Everybody showing up at the same time -- that's television, that's not the Net," says Fitzgerald.
Instead, she hired a couple book-loving regulars from the site to interview authors -- people like Dean Koontz and Anne Fadiman -- and more penetrating Q&As are the result, she believes. Fitzgerald is betting that targeted features -- such as an examination of women writers from the South, a celebration of Star Trek books, and articles on poets for National Poetry Month -- will build more of a substantive relationship with her readers than buzz-building star walk-throughs. She hopes that will pay off in brand loyalty.
The network's readers take Fitzgerald's recommendations seriously. When she plugged a write-your-own diary called All About Me in her weekly email newsletter, the book saw a modest uptick on Amazon.
Fitzgerald estimates that 70 to 80 percent of her readers are women, a legacy of the network's early days on AOL, when The Book Report was one of the service's few chat areas where women could hang out without being pestered by constant come-ons and age and sex checks. The gender imbalance has helped attract Gen-XX advertisers like iVillage.
Now the challenge is to inspire the kind of stable community among itchy-fingered netsurfers that the network offered to its captive audience on AOL. To that end, Fitzgerald will add discussion areas to the sites in the next couple of weeks.
She's already instituted a wish-list feature, allowing readers to compare the titles they'd like to read -- a canny combination of an online shopping cart and literate personal profile.
Fitzgerald says her content-centered approach is paying off in steady growth and solid sales.
"There's a lot of blowharding out there. A lot of [e-commerce sites] are built on a house of cards. This one's built on a mess of bricks."
