From Publishers Weekly:
Simon & Schuster has announced the launch of “Book Club Favorites,” a new direct-to-consumer initiative intended to promote titles from imprints across the company deemed of particular interest to book clubs. The first pick will be Alice Hoffman’s The Rules of Magic, which goes on sale June 26.
The publisher will select a new book—primarily paperback fiction—each month and invite readers to join a digitally-organized book club. The club will consist of a free monthly newsletter, a website, a Facebook group, and monthly sweepstakes held in conjunction with Bright Cellars (a monthly wine club partnering with the publisher on the program).
Customers can buy the book club selection from retailers listed on the book club site. Throughout each month, discussion questions and exclusive content will be housed on the website and Facebook Group.
“We are thrilled to be showcasing Simon & Schuster titles in this new way, which expands on our existing book club efforts and provides readers with a new way to engage with our books and authors,” Wendy Sheanin, v-p and director of marketing at Simon & Schuster, said in a statement. “We are equally excited to see the Book Club Favorites program bring readers together for thought-provoking and lively conversations about some of our favorite books.”
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
PG wonders how indie authors can possibly keep up with the marketing geniuses in Big Publishing.
A Facebook group! A website! Where do they come up with all these brilliant ideas?
@PG
“A Facebook group! A website! Where do they come up with all these brilliant ideas?”
They hire consultants to tell them what to do and where to go to do it. And the consultants, cynically, tell them exactly that! 🙂
When I had a book review blog a couple years back, I signed up for Penguin’s First to Read (e-arc) program. I still get emails from them with the books they have on offer. 90% of the covers look the same (fancy text and no imagery). The genres are usually literary fiction and variations thereof. (I read fantasy and romance, mostly.) Even their SF/F books look like literary versions of those genres. In other words, even their big releases that are getting the biggest marketing push hold no interest to me at all. Ask me how interested I am in (over)paying for them to send me whatever books they want me to read.
Tor does the same thing and has a monthly book club read. Although with Tor the book is free (digital download) as long as you belong to their book club.
Well, that’s one way of getting rid of extra copies without selling them as remainders, though I’ll just bet they’ll still be ‘sold’ as deep discounts so the authors get nothing.
And they want you to join a digitally-organized book club that doesn’t offer digital books, how quaint – not that I’d actually expect them to offer what I’d like to read.
Pass.
If you click on the website you’ll see some stuff about this months book, along with retailers links. If you click on the Amazon link, the landing page defaults to paperback – but the Kindle version *is* there, at $11.99. There are also links to iBooks, Kobo and Google Play, also at $11.99 — even itunes and audible, so yes, they offer digital books.
The “book club kit” offered for download has an author interview, discussion questions and an extensive Spotify playlist.
IMO, it actually looks like a nice free resource to someone who is organizing a book club and is attracted to the book(s) on offer.
I’ll also say that they have a slight advantage in that they can provide this resource consistently and regularly for the stream of books that they publish, whereas an indie working on their own can’t easily do that. Something like this would be a good reason for indies to band together in some way.
And I see the paperback is actually more than the ebook. But I would have thought if they were recommending it they’d have put it on sale to help this incentive (and if those are their ‘sale’ prices I can understand why sales are slow.)
YMMV as the kids say, but I don’t see this one as floating all that well (maybe if they held their book clubs at the diner sections of B&N … 😉 )