Marketing

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – April 1, 2013 – CapstoneYoungReaders.com was recently honored by the Web Marketing Association with the 2013 Internet Advertising Competition Award for excellence in online advertising. A prestigious panel of the best in the internet advertising community, including professionals from CNN News Group, Google, IBM Interactive, Ogilvy Interactive, and PayPal, judged the entries on criteria such as creativity, innovation, impact, design, and copywriting. The IAC awarded CapstoneYoungReaders.com with “Best Publishing Site.”

After two years of stops and starts, Bookish, the book discovery and e-commerce website co-owned by three of the world’s biggest publishers, finally opened for business in February. Seven weeks later, Amazon has acquired Goodreads, the leading book-centric social network.

Coincidence?

Of course, with 16 million members, San Francisco-based Goodreads is a logical enough acquisition target for the e-tailer. (The sale price hasn’t been disclosed but seems likely to have been in the low eight digits; according to Crunchbase, Goodreads had raised a total of $2.75 million in funding.)

 World Book Night has had a record number of givers sign up, with more than 23,000 people volunteering to hand out books in their communities.

More than half of the applicants have never taken part in the event before, with people applying from across the country, including the Scilly Isles and Outer Hebrides.

Taking place on April 23rd, World Book Night will see delivery service Yodel distribute 400,000 books to giver collection points, while a further 100,000 books will be sent directly…

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced last week the winner of the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the award for his collection of short fiction, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. The book was published by El Paso-based independent publisher Cinco Puntos Press.

Yesterday, Book Business had a chance to speak with John Byrd, Marketing Director and CFO of the family-run business. He’s had a few days now to absorb the news, celebrate, watch some college basketball, catch a cold, and recover. Now he shares his publishing insights with BB.

How are things playing out since the award was announced?
It’s been real nice. It’s been kinda hectic for us, especially for Ben [author Benjamin Alire Sáenz], who has made a lot of friends in the literary world in the 20 or 30 years he’s been publishing. He’s getting lots of phone calls and congratulations from people.

PLASTERED on the wall of San Francisco’s main public library are 50,000 index cards, formerly entries in the library’s catalogue. The tomes they refer to may be becoming decorative, too. Not only can library patrons now search the collection online, they may also check out electronic books without visiting the library. For librarians, “e-lending” is a natural offer in the digital age. Publishers and booksellers fear it could unbind their business.

Worries about the effect of libraries on the book trade are not new. But digital devices intensify them.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--BookBub today announced it has surpassed one million subscribers. The company, which sends readers a free daily email alerting them to limited-time discounts on acclaimed ebooks, is currently signing up between five and ten thousand new subscribers a day.

“When BookBub helps readers discover a new author or book they love, they want to share the experience with their friends.”

"The response to BookBub has been phenomenal, " said Josh Schanker, BookBub's president and co-founder. "Readers love taking advantage of the great deals, and publishers have found us to be an effective way to gain exposure for their titles and authors."

Doubleday announces an unprecedented free digital download in the U.S. and Canada of the #1 international bestseller The Da Vinci Code in celebration of the novel’s 10th anniversary.  Originally published on March 18, 2003, the thriller went on to be the fastest-selling adult hardcover of all time with 81 million copies sold.  Included in the download is the prologue and chapter one of Dan Brown’s forthcoming thriller, Inferno, to be published on May 14.  The free e-book will be available until March 24 through all e-book retailers.

Books, always, seem to defy expectations. Some are hyped to high heaven and never meet expectations; others surprise. Take the case of Herman Koch’s The Dinner. The Dutch novel, a huge success in Europe, has found itself in the top ten on The New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list for three weeks running.

Like the Times‘s own reviewer, Claire Messud, I had my doubts that the book would resonate with American readers.

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site, is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, it’s a new site where users can get recommendations based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like and then, in most cases, purchase them. Like the Random House project Book Scout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase directly from Bookish are not limited to those published by the companies who footed the bill.

When Pubslush started, it launched as more or less a Kickstarter for book projects, with books that met their funding goals being published exclusively by Pubslush. But the company relaunched last year with a different angle on its concept. Think of Pubslush now as part book incubator, and part market intelligence provider.

"When we relaunched, we wanted to be a friend to everyone in the industry," says Amanda Barbara, development director at Pubslush. "With the old model, we were in competition."