With Book Expo America set to convene in New York in a little over two weeks, we can already tell you the undisputed “big book” of the fair: BUZZ BOOKS 2013: Fall/Winter, released today, is our newest free ebook with substantial excerpts from 40 big titles to be featured at BEA and into the big fall season, weighing in at a big 750 virtual pages.
It was just a year ago that we began this very successful initiative, giving thousands of publishing people and passionate readers alike their first look at such major debuts as Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, ML Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, and Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist, plus many other soon-to-be bestsellers and “books of the year” including Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her.
The new edition builds on that successful tradition with the first look at major authors you know and love — Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Gilbert, Wally Lamb, Amy Tan, Sue Grafton and Chang-Rae Lee — and debut novels from Hanya Yanagihara (The People in the Trees), Hannah Kent, (Burial Rites), Valerie Plame (Blowback), Graeme Simsion (The Rosie Project) and even James Franco (Actors Anonymous).
A bigger YA and children’s section boasts work from Walter Dean Myers, Brandon Sanderson, James Swanson, and Tamora Pierce. And a bigger-than-ever nonfiction sections includes bestselling author Alan Weisman anticipated second book Countdown, along with excerpts from New York writer Dana Goodyear and Luke Barr and newsmaking books on the way from Johnny Carson confidant Henry Bushkin and Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints survivor Rebecca Musser (The Witness Wore Red).
And Publishers Lunch editor Sarah Weinman’s detailed preview of the season — which opens the book — provides a condensed and informed look at over 100 other buzzworthy titles to look out for, at BEA and in the months to come.
The trade edition is available by direct epub download from us, and special editions from NetGalley and Kindle. It includes detailed rights, publicity and promotional info and click-throughs at the end of almost all the excerpts to request or immediately download the full digital galley from NetGalley.
The consumer edition — to share with your readers, BEA Power Readers and more — is available across all major ebookstores (ISBN 978-0985491079). And an abbreviated edition, still rich with 17 excerpts, is available in ebookstores around the world (978-0989321303) for readers outside of the US.
Great Partners
We are fortunate to be joined by a number of terrific partners in producing and promoting Buzz Books to the world, and we owe them all significant thanks:
Two of those partners are now under the same corporate roof at Firebrand: Joshua Tallent and his team at eBook Architects calmly and professionally build the 9 different file versions (with dozens of embedded links, images and more). NetGalley makes it so that in the trade version, you can click through at the end of the excerpts for almost all of the titles and request or immediately read the full galley, and they share the word about Buzz Books with their community of over 100,000 users.
Ingram smoothly distributes all of those different file versions across all major platforms and around the world. And through Lightning Source they produce printed versions (which make a great showcase for their affordable color printing, with each of the book jackets show in color at the beginning of every excerpt). This edition is a big fat 754-page book, which you may be lucky enough to spot at BEA.
Many others are involved as well: Hilsinger-Mendelson runs our PR/media campaigns. Amazon makes it possible to provide a Kindle-formatted version of the trade edition that we can keep semi-private; the ABA shares those lovely printed editions that Ingram produces through their white box mailings (note that 12 of the titles in our Spring/Summer edition have already made Indie Next Lists, including three consecutive No. 1 picks), and working with Kobo they distribute promotional banners to help booksellers put this terrific sampler onto customers’ devices.
Of course Buzz Books would not exist without the enthuasiastic support of the participating publishers, authors, editors and publicists. That roster expands with every edition, and this time around we’re pleased to welcome MacLehose Press and Scholastic to the mix. On the Publishers Lunch staff, our projects director Robin Dellabough makes a highly complex process — managing all these partners, publishers and authors — a smooth operation.