Following last fall's Thanks for Shopping Indie program and this past spring's Celebrate Debut Authors with Indies promotion, the American Booksellers Association is gearing up for its next initiative: Indies Introduce Debut Authors.
"After the success of the Small Business Saturday promotion, we [the ABA] talked a lot about how we could continue to work with publishers," explained Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, the ABA's senior program officer. "Debut authors kept coming up, because the indies are so instrumental in bringing debut authors to new readers."
The Debut Authors promotion, which begins in August and will last until the end of the year, features a range of promo materials and incentives but differs from this spring's campaign in one major way: the featured titles were chosen by booksellers. Thirteen booksellers, divided between an adult committee and a children's book committee, read manuscript after manuscript and deliberated for nearly two months. The results were the 22 titles (12 adult books, both fiction and nonfiction, and 10 children's books) announced at the beginning of May. Betsy Burton of the King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, chaired the adult committee, while Becky Quiroga Curtis of Books & Books, with stores in south Florida, New York and the Cayman Islands, chaired the children's committee. Both panels included booksellers from across the country.
"I think what's so great about this program is that it feels organic," said Wendy Sheanin, director of marketing for Simon & Schuster's adult publishing group. "To have these booksellers endorse these titles is hands-down the strength of the program. It's not a bunch of publishers telling you what you should be excited about. These booksellers are tastemakers."
The adult committee read more than 35 manuscripts during the selection process. Members ranked and rated each submission in a shared spreadsheet maintained by Dallanegra-Sanger, and held frequent conference calls to discuss the books. According to Burton, there weren't many narrow cuts--stand-out books rose to the top fairly quickly. The children's committee followed a similar method, reading about 20 titles for younger readers.
"For the most part, the people on the panel were buyers at their stores," Burton said. "They were all very thoughtful readers. I found it such an exhilarating thing to do, to be on the panel and talk time after time about books. It just emphasized for me how great this profession is."
As the same books began to appear at the top of most lists, the idea of distinguishing those books came up in conversation. Eventually, the panelists agreed to select one fiction, one nonfiction and one children's title as Indies Introduce Jury Picks. The winners--The Lion Seeker by Kenneth Bonnert (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for fiction, Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler (Scribner) for nonfiction and Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell (Simon & Schuster) for children's--were announced at the Celebration of Bookselling & Author Awards Lunch at BookExpo America in May.
"The sense of excitement [at the awards lunch] was palpable," said Becky Anderson, of Anderson's Book Shop in Naperville, Ill. "This one excites me most out of any of the other promotions. It's what we indies do best: we create the buzz. Let's be loud about it."
Indies now have until next Monday, July 1, to sign up for the promotion. Participating stores are required to promote at least six of the 22 titles with in-store displays and on any applicable social media or web presence. Among the promotional incentives available are exclusive, signed, first-edition copies of the books and author videos. Dallanegra-Sanger explained: "That's something I've learned from being at the ABA--we need to provide some amount of selection. Booksellers know their audiences and community. What might be right for one store may not be perfect for another."
"This underlines our highest and best use as independent booksellers," said Burton, who will do several reviews for NPR and plans to feature the books as debut books of the month. "Anyone can sell something that has already gotten to the top of the pile. It's easy for Amazon or whoever to get on board books that have already been discovered. But I think the discovery process is something that indies do better than everyone else."
Anderson plans to stock and make a display of every title on the list, and has ideas for more promotions, including bringing in some of the debut authors for events, giving customers chances to win free T-shirts or Kobo Minis, and offering the debut selections at a discounted rate. But whatever the promotion, "the important part is getting these new authors out there, getting their books in customers' hands," she said.
Quiroga-Curtis agreed. "In the end, it's a matter of selling these books, and we plan on doing just that."
More information about the promotion, including blurbs, registration details and the full list of committee members, can be found here. A list of the 22 selected titles is here. --Alex Mutter
