Marketing

Joseph-Beth Booksellers, which has four locations in Kentucky and Ohio, has turned to paid advertising on Facebook as a way to promote its many events to a wide range of people with similar interests.

On February 13, Algonquin kicked off “Lucky 7,” a monthly e-book promotion offering seven backlist titles in e-book format for seven days for $1.99 each. This month’s theme is “Author Crush.”

The Art of Selling Books, a new promotion from Abrams that offers 90-days dating, free freight, and extra discounts on 20 curated assortments of front and backlist titles for adults and children, is getting an enthusiastic reception from indie booksellers around the country.

The newly updated Indie Next List nomination shelf-talker draws booksellers’ attention to submission deadlines for the next five months and is ideal for placement in a bookstore’s back room or wherever staff reading copies and ARCs are kept.

World Book Night U.S. has announced the 30 titles to be given away by 50,000 volunteer book lovers in its inaugural campaign to distribute one million free books across America on April 23, 2012. The registration process for those wishing to become volunteer book givers is open until February 1.

Three new e-book promotions, starting later this month, are now featured on IndieCommerce.com’s Publisher Promotions page.

Big or small, three years old or 100-plus, many independent bookstores reported robust sales for Black Friday weekend, ranging from five to 250 percent over the same period last year.

With the completion last week of IndieCommerce’s pre-holiday upgrades, booksellers have a new set of tools to drive sales between their bricks-and-mortar and online stores and customers have an easier shopping experience.

With the recent arrivals of the ABC Best Books for Children catalog and the New Voices fliers, indie booksellers have two robust tools to help guide holiday shoppers toward a selection of outstanding books for children and teens.

World Book Night U.S. has launched the official website for the April 23 celebration that aims to spread a love of reading and books through the giveaway of a million books across the country on one night. WBN also launched this week on Twitter and Facebook.

The best approach to promoting e-books is multiple approaches — feature them in general and targeted electronic and print newsletters, advertise online and in-store, train staff, and “just be relentless”— is the collective opinion of booksellers who shared their best practices with BTW.

For new booksellers and experienced ones who would like a quick review, we present BTW’s annual holiday preparations checklist. We hope you’ll find something here that can help make the season go a little smoother for you, your staff, and your customers.

New holiday designs, which bear the tagline “Indie Booksellers Hold Up Half the Sky,” are now available in ABA’s Bookseller DIY.

Plans for the April 23 celebration of World Book Night in the U.S. are moving along, with the announcement this week of the U.S. organization’s Board of Directors and news that the title selection process is nearing completion.

Candlewick Press has named Marika McCoola of The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts, as the winner of its CHIRP scholarship to Winter Institute 7.