Thursday, November 19, 2015

Shop Small & 2015 National Book Award Winners

I had a nice treat last night while flipping channels on TV, stopping to watch the American Express Shop Small promotion and there is Mitchell Kaplan from one of the great books stores anywhere, Books & Books in Miami (he has about 10 stores in total) .  

I stopped because Shop Small is such a powerful and great initiative.  Amex started it in 2010 and it is something that works amazingly well in the world of indie books stores.  So go out and shop at a local business or bookstore on Saturday Nov. 28th and you will probably be helped by an author if not someone from the ABA.  

Now check out the link, but don't blink - Mitchell owns the screen, popping in at the 7 second mark and is gone by the 8 second mark. 


While you are shopping on Saturday 11/18 - here are some great books to pick up:


The 2015 National Book Awards Winners:



Young People's Literature



Neal Shusterman
Challenger Deep
(HarperCollins Children's Books)
 



Poetry



Robin Coste Lewis
Voyage of the Sable Venus
Alfred A. Knopf
 



Nonfiction



Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me
(Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House)




Fiction



Adam Johnson
Fortune Smiles: Stories
(Random House)



Friday, November 13, 2015

It is a buzzy time of year....

Submissions for BEA Editors’ Buzz are due next week - closing November 18th!!! 

If you have not been or don't know what a Buzz panel is: BEA Editors’ Buzz is one of the marquee platforms at BEA for promoting new titles.  It is where editors share their excitement and passion for their Fall 2016 releases!

Previous Buzz highlights: We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel, by Matthew Thomas; Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel; Five Days At Memorial, by Sheri Fink; Room, by Emma Donoghue; The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan; The Maze Runner, by James Dasher; Fangirl, by Rainbow Rowell; What’s Left of Me, by Kat Zhang; The Jewel, by Amy Ewing, and Life of Zarf, Rob Harell.

There are rules and selection guidelines for publishers to follow.  The three main Buzz panels are:
• Adult Editors’ Buzz
• Young Adult Editors’ Buzz
• Middle Grade Editors’ Buzz

The attraction for booksellers and industry people are hearing from the editor of the presented the title and understanding why they are so invested, what excited them in the first place, details on what made them believe in a title and why they expect it to be such a big book.  

BEA has added a Editors Buzz panels in 2015 for Graphic Novels and Translated Titles. We are now planning to add a Sci-Fi Fantasy Buzz panel for BEA 2016 in Chicago as well as plans to have the books available in a digital format..

Virtually every book that has been selected to one of the main Editor's Buzz Panels over the last 3 years has landed on the New York Times bestsellers list.  We look forward to getting all the submissions from publishers big and small, the books are selected by a very hard working committee.