Marketing

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), selected five books as finalists for the 2013 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, which honors the best nonfiction books written for young adults between Nov. 1, 2011 and Oct. 31, 2012. YALSA will name the 2013 award winner at the Youth Media Awards at 7:45 a.m. on Jan. 28, in Seattle during the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting.

Even Pippa Middleton is not immune to book sales woes. As widely reported, sales of Pippa's book — even with the best distribution, publicity and name recognition — have fallen flat. If her sales are disappointing, what can authors who do not have the benefit of famous relatives or name recognition do to sell books?

For most authors, book sales are an important part of why they write a book. They want to entertain, educate, inspire or simply share their artistic work — and perhaps make money from the venture.

Measuring the efficacy of social media marketing still isn't an exact science, regardless of what the gurus and ninjas tell you.

So how can we whittle all the thousands of social campaigns we've seen this year down to a definitive list of the '10 best of 2012'?

Do we gauge it on the number of new fans acquired, retweets, ROI, YouTube views, the number of people it reached, sentiment analysis, the amount of traffic it drove or maybe the number of new brand advocates it created?

The nature of book publishing is changing, in ways big and small. In fact, the very nature of what a book ‘is’ is shifting. But that’s not what I’ve been thinking about these past few days. No, my exploration today is about authors – and what the author of the future needs to do in order to be good partners with their publisher.

Wow, did I just say that? You bet I did. Partners. Because the nature of how books are conceived, written, and brought to market, is being dramatically re-invented.

If there’s one thing every self-published author yearns for, it’s to be reviewed alongside traditionally published books, but for most that’s a dream that is unlikely to come true. Book reviewers, whether for traditional book review columns or book blogs, frequently don’t accept submissions from self-published authors. Instead, there’s a web of professional relationships between traditional publishers and reviewers which keeps the books and the reviews flowing.

But this week, the New York Times published a long and enthusiastic review of a self-published book, Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised.

And the ebook race is on in Brazil.

While we here at Book Business tend to focus our attention on the U.S. (and, to an extent, the U.K. markets), we've been keeping an eye on publishers' and retailers' ebook efforts in other parts of the world. The lure of easy digital distribution to all those billions of readers in markets like South Asia, South America, Africa and beyond must be absolutely mouthwatering for retailers.

OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and O, The Oprah Magazine announce the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (Knopf).  In her extraordinary debut, Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one indomitable heroine (Hattie) and her unforgettable family. The novel has earned starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist. “The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away,” said Winfrey, OWN CEO, “I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.”

Experts in book app development and marketing gathered today at the Media App Summit in New York to talk tools for discoverability and profitability. Panelists stressed that discoverability begins with a quality product and understanding your target market.

"I know first-hand how painful discovery can be in the app marketplace," Matt Cavnar, VP of business development at Vook, told the audience. Publishers, he pointed out, often still have trouble getting traction for a good product in an environment where app creation has gotten easier and cheaper.

Self-help guru Tim Ferriss may have had a troubled start with his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, but now it’s flying off the shelves. The book in question has gone from being boycotted by Barnes and Noble to becoming the first BitTorrent bestseller.

Here’s the story. The book is published by Amazon Publishing, which signed the back in August 2011. As a result, Barnes and Noble, as well as a few other brick and mortar booksellers, declared that they will not carry the book, as part of their battle with Amazon…

Every time a new user clicks “like” on the HMH Kids’ Polar Express-themed Facebook page, the company will donate one book to First Book (until December 25th). The publisher has agreed to give away up to 25,000 books to the literacy nonprofit.