BusinessWeek profiles Robert Brunner, the designer of Barnes & Noble’s Nook devices, who was approached by the company in 2008. He was also a consulting designer to Amazon in the development of the first “wedgie” Kindle and had a role in Apple’s Newton handheld as that company’s director of industrial design. When Barnes & Noble approached him, Brunner said, “the company knew ‘nothing’ about digital media, and wanted to know about how you would create a product and bring it to market.” Their shared goal was to keep the device simple and remove as many buttons as possible. “Books don’t […]
Marketing
Harry Potter Portal “Pottermore” Gears Up for Launch
With the final Harry Potter movie releasing in exactly a month, an online promotion challenged Harry Potter fans to decode the name of a new Potter-related website: Pottermore.com. The tease has led to all kinds of unbridled speculation. The folks at fan site The Leaky Cauldron have seen the site and say “it is, in a word, breathtaking. That is all we are permitted to say at the moment.” (And they understood it’s not a new book, even though a lot of fans are not listening.) Take note that the Pottermore name was trademarked by Warner Bros. in mid-2009. The […]
USA Bolsters Online Book Pages
USA Today has soft-launched a revised and expanded books section on the newspaper’s web site, complicated with a dedicated sub-domain, books.usatoday.com. Among the features, their bestseller list has a graphics-enriched consumer-friendly new presentation (and is featured on the books home page as well). Importantly for publishers and publicists, the Book Buzz column will now act as a daily blog, with contributions from across the USA Today books department staff. Book reviews have a consistent new page design featuring the jacket and click-to-buy links at Amazon, BN, IndieBound and iTunes, and those review pages pull in reader reviews from GoodReads and […]
Briefs: BN Stock Drops to All-Time Lows; Former Mobster’s Book Events Cancelled; And More
Wall Street’s hate affair with Barnes & Noble‘s stock has continued. Shares fell more than a dollar yesterday, declining more than 9 percent, to finish at what was an all-time low. Until the market opened this morning, with prices down another 4 percent in early trading, standing at about $10.25 a share. (The overall market is down broadly today, with major indices down over 2 percent.) The company’s stock has fallen over 45 percent in less than a month. Two Chicago-area Borders book signings for former mobster Frank Calabrese Jr.‘s book Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster’s Son and the […]
Publicize This: How to Get the WSJ to Break Your Book
The WSJ’s recently-launched weekend Review section proved it can put a book on the nation’s radar with their attention-getting (and controversially titled) except from Amy Chua’s book. (The book is called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; the WSJ called their excerpt “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.”) The splash made an ideal segue to a breakfast convened by the newspaper this morning with publishers and book publicists and marketers this morning. As Review section editor Gary Rosen said, “We want to be the place where the big buzzy books start.” Rosen spoke to the support the paper provided to promote […]
Grand Central Thriller Authors to Promote Each Other
Grand Central is trying a new kind of free ebook giveaway, cross-promoting two titles with each other. So the ebook of Brad Meltzer’s new book THE INNER CRICLE will include a free edition of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s 2002 novel The Cabinet of Curiosities, and the ebook of Preston and Child’s new title GIDEON’S SWORD will include Meltzer’s 2005 book The Zero Game. The publisher says the idea began with a suggestion from Preston and Child to Meltzer: “Doug and Lincoln emailed me and asked. They thought it would be a great way for us to thank readers while […]