With BEA itself just two weeks away, the real convention business of discovering, sampling and sharing big new “discovery” books for the fall/winter publishing seasons begins today. Our new free ebook Buzz Books 2014: Fall/Winter presents substantial, pre-publication excerpts from over 30 forthcoming books — including a dozen authors who will be at the convention. We have highly-touted debuts (from Matthew Thomas, Jessie Burton, Katy Simpson Smith, Nayomi Munaweera, Audrey Magee, Judy Chicurel and more); headliners (Neil Patrick Harris, Alan Cumming, Billy Idol, Peter Thiel); serious nonfiction (Morten Storm, Matt Richtel); established authors (Deborah Harkness, Lev Grossman, John Scalzi, Tana French, Michael Faber); and many more.
Plus, for the first time, we’re publishing a separate free ebook Buzz Books 2014: Young Adult with another 20+ excerpts — and another 15 authors appearing at BEA. This special sure-to-viral edition includes Ellen Hopkins, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfeld, Carl Hiaasen, Michael Perry, Ben Tripp, Meg Wolitzer, Frank Portman, Becca Fitzpatrick, James Frey and many others.
As usual, there are a variety of ways of getting these free ebooks and starting your BEA reading right away. Both editions are available from all major ebookstores — and both BB Fall/Winter and BB YA are featured prominently right now in the iBookstore, in the Hot This Week carousel and the recommended Free Books page. We call these our “consumer editions” and they are the ones to share via your social networks to help passionate readers everywhere starting sampling (and pre-ordering) some of the big fall books.
We also have our “trade” editions, which include additional trade-focused information at the end of each excerpt — including publicity and promotional plans, pr and rights contacts, price and ISBN info, and click-throughs to request/download the full digital galleys. Go to this page for BB Fall/Winter, and this one for BB YA, to download EPUB versions of the trade editions, or click-through to NetGalley to get the trade editions through them. (Edelweiss will have the trade editions available in their system soon, too.)
Instead of worrying about lists of printed galleys you might want to grab at the convention, get the show started right now by getting a real taste of the books and authors you want to focus on at the show and in the months ahead!
As all the publishers in our audience will recognize, compiling and publishing these books — comprising contributions from dozens of publishing houses and over 50 authors — depends on the valued participation of a lot of talented partners. Ingram has distributed our ebooks throughout their network from the start, and they print the very-limited-editions of galleys (complete with color covers inside) that we distribute after the BEA Buzz panels and out to the ABA white box recipients. eBook Architects, the ebook production experts, turn the complicated process of assembling all the different pieces into about 20 different file versions into a seamless, on-deadline turnaround. Their corporate brethren at NetGalley not only distribute the trade editions to their growing list and link within their system to full galleys, but they also promote those editions prominently to their community. BEA is helping us to spread the word (and those printed copies) at the show, and helping us get our downloads to the big new BookCon crowd, and ACW Concepts built the Buzz Books website that showcases all of the titles (and all of the praise for previous Buzz Books titles). Hilsinger-Mendelson is once again driving our extensive publicity campaign, and the new Logical Marketing is running our paid social media campaigns. All of that happens under the direction of our unflappable PM projects director Robin Dellabough and the rest of the PM team — and with the enthusiastic participation of the authors and publishers whose work we are privileged to share with you.