New Round of Panorama Picks Announced

The latest Panorama Picks have been released by the Panorama Project, which aims to spotlight under-the-radar backlist titles library patrons have been waiting to borrow in nine different regions across the U.S.

Each region’s list features 25 titles in fiction, nonfiction, and young adult categories for a total of 517 unique titles — 467 of which appear on two or fewer regional lists, reflecting the diverse interests and unmet demand of avid readers in each region.

Notable titles popular in multiple regions include Alyssa Cole’s A Princess in Theory (HarperCollins, 2018), Nora Roberts’ Night Moves (Silhouette, 2018), Andrea Owen’s How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t (Basic Books, 2018), Edward Lee’s Buttermilk Graffiti (Artisan, 2018), Anthony Horowitz’s Never Say Die (Penguin Young Readers Group, 2017), and Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk About Love (Feiwel & Friends, 2018).

The regional lists are optimized for local booksellers via groupings aligned with the regional bookseller associations, and are intended to help libraries and booksellers work together more effectively to better serve active readers in their communities, while helping publishers and authors identify regional marketing opportunities for titles (and authors) that have moved beyond their initial marketing windows.

Panorama Picks’ regional lists are generated using aggregated, anonymized U.S. public library e-book demand data provided by OverDrive, and the following process:

• Three categories: Adult Fiction, Adult Nonfiction, YA Fiction & Nonfiction
• Eight regions aligned with the regional bookseller associations, plus Hawaii
• 25 titles (trade and self-published) published in the last 12–24 months that are available in print to libraries and booksellers
• Filtered to limit known bestsellers, book club selections, other heavily promoted titles, etc.
• Updated quarterly

The quarterly lists surface a wide range of in-demand titles in their respective regions. Some are familiar titles that are enjoying sustained popularity; others are under-the-radar titles that might not have grabbed national attention but are generating notable local interest well past their initial publication date. In all cases, they represent an opportunity for booksellers, authors, and publishers to better leverage public libraries’ power as a primary discovery channel for avid readers.

The Panorama Project is a cross-industry research initiative committed to aggregating and analyzing data from publishers, distributors, booksellers, public libraries, library service providers, search sites, social sites, and other relevant data sources and identifying ways publishers and libraries can continue to support their intrinsically related missions while delivering mutually beneficial outcomes.

The project is led by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez and an advisory council that includes members from Penguin Random House, Sourcebooks, Open Road Media, American Library Association, Audio Publishers Association, Cuyahoga County Public Library, NISO, Rakuten OverDrive, and Ingram Content Group.