BTW News Briefs

Black Friday Weekend/Cyber Monday Break Records

The National Retail Federation reported that Black Friday Weekend set new records for traffic and spending both online and in stores.

According to a survey conducted for NRF by BIGresearch, a record 226 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 212 million in 2010. The average shopper spent $398.62 this weekend, up from $365.34 last year. Total spending for Black Friday Weekend is estimated to be $52.4 billion, with 37.8 percent of that devoted to online shopping, where the average consumer spent $150.53. The survey found 28.7 million people shopped online and at stores on Thanksgiving Day — up from 22.2 million last year.

More than one-quarter (25.7 percent) of consumers with tablet devices told NRF that they did or will purchase items with their devices, and 37.4 percent will or have researched products and compared prices with their tablets. Overall, more than half (57.1 percent) said they have or will use their tablet devices to shop for gifts this weekend.

Cyber Monday sales also broke a record, according to NetworkWorld, which reported that there was a  $1.25 billion worth of online purchases on the first business day of the week following Thanksgiving.

Monday’s $1.25 billion tally was 22 percent bigger than last year’s Cyber Monday total, making it the biggest online spending day in history, and the second day on record to surpass the billion-dollar threshold, according to comScore. Overall, 10 million people bought online on Cyber Monday, up 11 percent from 2010. The average online buyer conducted 1.9 online transactions for a total of nearly $125 in spending (up nine percent from last year).

Staff Picks Press Sells Title to S&S

The Business Review reported this week on the sale by Susan Novotny’s Staff Picks Press of the rights to a novel written by local author Peter Golden to Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The novel Comeback Love will be published April 3 with a print run of more than 35,000 copies, according to the paper. Novotny’s other businesses include The Troy Book Makers, The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, and Market Block Books in Troy, New York.

Comeback Love, which was the first novel and the second book published by Staff Pick’s Press, was released in November 2010. Novotny told the newspaper that the advance was “a very good deal,” between $50,000 and $100,000, plus a percentage of every book sold going forward.

Novotny talked about the advantages of starting her own publishing company at the panel “Exploring New Partnerships Between Indie Booksellers and Authors“ at Winter Institute 6, where she told booksellers that she read Golden’s novel “in two gulps and didn’t want it to end.”

The latest title published by Staff Picks Press is the memoir Where’s the Watch?  by actor Len Lesser, who most recently portrayed Uncle Leo on Seinfeld.

New York Times Names 10 Best Books of 2011

The New York Times announced its picks for the “10 Best Books of 2011” on Wednesday. Featured, with brief descriptions, are:

• The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (Little, Brown)
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King (Scribner)
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Knopf/Vintage Contemporaries)
• Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Random House)
• Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)
• The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son by Ian Brown (St. Martin’s)
• Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (FSG)
• A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman (Random House)

Consortium Hosts IndieView Twitter Chat

Since October, the staff of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution has been hosting a weekly 30-minute Twitter chat about independent publishing, using the hashtag #indieview. The chat occurs every Wednesday from 10:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. EST. “We’ve had great participation so far (on average 20 people per chat), and we’d love to have more perspectives from outside the industry,” said Consortium Marketing Director Jennifer Swihart Voegele. Participants to date have included indie publishers and booksellers, bloggers, writers, librarians, general readers, and even an editor at a big publishing house.

Swihart Voegele invites all booklovers to “listen in from time to time.” This week’s chat focused on indie publishers and social media.