In a recent trend online, querying writers are posting agents and editors guides to their unpublished manuscripts. The guides comprise four images or slides and include the title, comps, a brief plot description, and other information presented concisely and visually. The trend was originated by Shardai Smith, a fiction and horror author who also works in book marketing. Smith posted a guide to her novel From Our Blood back in March. She tells PL she was inspired by indie authors who have been making pitch guides for their readers for a while. “As a book marketer, I’ve followed a few […]
Trends
Sales Trends Turn Positive
For the last three weeks, Circana Bookscan’s weekly totals of print book sales have been ahead of results for 2022, showing positive signs from the marketplace heading into the biggest sales period of the year. The only other time this year that current weekly sales have run ahead of last year for more than one week at a time was a five-week streak in March and April headed into Easter. The total market gained approximately 500,000 units over the past three weeks versus the same sales weeks in 2022, with the gains driven by adult titles, which were up 4 […]
2017: The Year In Mergers, Acquisitions and Finance
Anyone who thinks it was a quiet year for publishing mergers, acquisitions and finance doesn’t understand what happened very well. It was in fact both an active and fascinating year. First and foremost, 2017 saw one of the biggest trade publishing deals ever. We’re talking about the transaction hiding in plain sight, in which Bertelsmann acquired an additional 22 percent of Penguin Random House from Pearson, for actual cash. Remember that when Random House and Penguin merged in July 2013, it was a mammoth “deal” in that it created the world’s largest trade publishing company, but no money actually changed […]
WTF: Swear Word Coloring Books Charge the Bestseller Lists
When Amazon’s CreateSpace helped power the self-published The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep to the top of the charts it was a sweet story, but self-published print success has taken on a different face this month, with a wave of “swear word” coloring books. One Swear Word Adult Coloring Book sold enough units to enter Nielsen Bookscan’s overall bestseller list at No. 54 for the sales week ending January 24. That same title was No. 1 on Amazon’s weekly bestseller list (the real one, that counts actual sales over the course of a full week) for the same sales week […]
Scholastic Names Trends in Children’s Books for 2010
Drawing on their experience distributing books from all children’s publishers through their school book clubs and book fairs, Scholastic’s editors created a list of ten trends from the year in children’s books. President of Scholastic Book Clubs Judy Newman remarks in the release, “We’ve seen some exciting innovation in children’s publishing in 2010, including new formats and platforms for storytelling that are helping more and more kids become book lovers. At the same time, we’re seeing a rejuvenation of some classic genres, which I think is evidence of the timeless power that stories and characters have on the lives of […]
Publish Film Sell?
The LAT claims that “a movie’s release often leads to only a small uptick in a tie-in book’s sales” while declaring the EAT, PRAY, LOVE tie-in “the big exception this year.” The interesting part is that the book returned to the top of the bestseller lists in late May, well in advance of the movie’s marketing campaign. Separately, Nielsen released a chart on sales for the Elizabeth Gilbert book, which recorded sales of 94,000 units in the week ending August 1 alone. Sales in 2010 of 721,000 copies are more than double last year’ sales (and the movie release August […]