Bestselling author Richelle Mead will get her own app, The World of Richelle Mead, launching on March 2 from Penguin. The free app is a community-based bookshelf with excerpts from all of the Vampire Academy series and Bloodlines series (with links to purchase the books), character bios and character relationships features, and a bio page for Mead that includes links to her Twitter account and video. The app is designed to be a destination for readers to discuss plotlines and characters, and to share quotes with each other; the app's community includes polls, news, and a map of the locations of users.
Razorbill president Ben Schrank, who publishes Mead, said that the app's community aspect allows users "to communicate about what's inside Richelle's novels, with other fans, and will create a bridge between fans that did not exist before." Schrank said the goal of the app is to "help Richelle build and maintain her loyal fan base in a discrete setting," and that "if it's as successful as we think it should be, we will roll the format out to other authors."
The Vampire Academy series has 5.5 million copies in print, and the first book in the Bloodlines series has 350,000 copies in print. Book two in the latter series, The Golden Lily, will be out in June.
