Archive for the ‘publishers’ Category

Monday, March 7th, 2011

March Early Reviewers Batch is up!

The March 2011 batch of Early Reviewer books is up! We’ve got 110 books this month, and a grand total of 2,914 copies to give out. It’s our largest ER batch ever!
First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.
Then request away! The list of available books is here:
http://www.librarything.com/er/list
The deadline to request a copy is Monday, March 28th at 6 p.m. EST.
Eligibility: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and many other countries. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.
Thanks to all the publishers participating this month!

HarperCollins Childrens Books WaterBrook Press W.W. Norton
Hyperion and Voice University of Iowa Press Taylor Trade Publishing
Del Rey Mulholland Books Goose Lane
St. Martin’s Press McFarland Doubleday Books
McBooks Press Tradewind Books Langdon Street Press
The Permanent Press Red Telephone Books Skyhorse Publishing
Aro Books worldwide DK Publishing Sterling Publishing
Human Kinetics Harper Paperbacks Nolo
Random House The Dial Press Zed Books
MSI Press Spiegel & Grau South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Ballantine Books Plume Rovira i Virgili University Press
Bell Bridge Books Bloomsbury Orca Book Publishers
BookViewCafe Bethany House Putnam Books
Chosen Books St. Martin’s Minotaur Riverhead Books
Bantam Dell Unbridled Books Penguin Young Readers Group
Cascada Productions Sole Books Blackbird Ventures
A & N Publishing St. Martin’s Griffin Crown Publishing
Saqi Books Kube Publishing HighBridge
Demos Health Souper Publishing Sovereign
Nimbus Publishing Seriously Good Books

Labels: early reviewers, publishers

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Free Books! February ER Batch is up!

The February 2011 batch of Early Reviewer books is up!  It’s our second-largest ER batch ever, with 105 titles and a grand total of 2,645 copies to give out.

First, make sure to sign up for Early Reviewers. If you’ve already signed up, please check your mailing address and make sure it’s correct.

Then request away! The list of available books is here: http://www.librarything.com/er/list

The deadline to request a copy is Monday, February 28th at 6PM EST.

Eligiblity: Publishers do things country-by-country. This month we have publishers who can send books to the US, Canada, the UK, and many more countries. Make sure to check the flags by each book to see if it can be sent to your country.

Thanks to all the publishers participating this month! If you’re a publisher and want to find out how to participate, just go here.

HarperCollins Childrens Books WaterBrook Press Henry Holt and Company
Kregel Publications W.W. Norton Harper Paperbacks
New American Library Orca Book Publishers Taylor Trade Publishing
Del Rey Spectra Crossway
Mulholland Books Quirk Books Signet
Tundra Books Sourcebooks St. Martin’s Griffin
Penguin Young Readers Group Random House Trade Paperbacks Doubleday Books
Ballantine Books Hunter House Osprey Publishing
St. Martin’s Press HighBridge Putnam Books
Riverhead Books Hyperion and Voice Bell Bridge Books
Open Books BookViewCafe Random House
Spiegel & Grau Nolo Penguin
McFarland Simon & Schuster Bloomsbury
Turner Publishing Pomegranate William Morrow
One Peace Books Rovira i Virgili University Press LUNA
MIRA Listen to Your Heart Press Tradewind Books
St. Martin’s Minotaur Thomas Dunne Books Bantam Dell
Harper Faber and Faber inGroup Press
Gefen Publishing House

Labels: early reviewers, LTER, publishers

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

How can Publishers use LibraryThing?

We’ve done some more sprucing up, and are happy to announce a new How Publishers Can Use LibraryThing page. Mainly this is to simplify signup for the Early Reviewers and LibraryThing for Publishers programs (illustrated here), but it’s also designed to provide a single page to highlight all the various ways publishers can become a part of the LibraryThing community.

We continue to add publishers to LibraryThing for Publishers, and are very happy to announce that the University of California Press has joined the program.

If you’re a publisher and want to get started, just head on over to the new page for all the necessary information and instructions. We’ll be happy to help get you set up with your profile page.

Labels: LibraryThing for Publishers, publishers

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

London Book Fair

A few weeks ago I flew across the pond to speak at the London Book Fair. The panel* I was on focused on books and marketing in an online world. I talked about how traditional marketing is seen as just spam when it comes onto social networking sites (the “hi, want to be my friend? buy my book!” posts endear no one), and how authors need to genuinely participate and become part of the community online.

On LibraryThing, there are a number of ways for authors and publishers to become involved. I talked about Early Reviewers, of course, but also Author Chats, LibraryThing Local (add upcoming readings!), and our (upcoming) author interviews.

I spent the rest of the fair walking around to publisher booths, inviting them to join Early Reviewers. We have a majority of the big publishers in the US participating, but only a handful in the rest of the world. Part of this trip was to attempt to remedy that, one country at a time (if LibraryThing wants to fund an Abby world tour, that’s fine by me)! I talked to many UK publishers, and hopefully we’ll see some books available to more countries on the Early Reviewers lists soon!

And, of course, London was great fun. I’d only ever been to England on layovers before (meaning, I’d been to Heathrow, but not beyond the airport walls!). In the evenings I played tourist and walked all over the city. I only went inside a few places, but the highlight was definitely the underground The Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

*See Lance Fensterman’s (my fellow panelist and director of BookExpo America) post about the panel here, and the moderator, Chad Post’s here.

Labels: author chat, authors, early reviewers, London Book Fair, publishers

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Introducing LibraryThing Local

Today we* unveil a major new section of the site, LibraryThing Local.

What is it? LibraryThing Local is a gateway to thousands of local bookstores, libraries and book festivals—and to all the author readings, signings, discussions and other events they host. It is our attempt to accomplish what hasn’t happened yet—the effective linking of the online and offline book worlds. Books still don’t fully “work” online; this is a step toward mending them.

LibraryThing Local is a handy reference, but it’s also interactive. You can show off your favorite bookstores and libraries (eg., mine include the Harvard Bookstore, Shakespeare and Company and the Boston Athenaeum) and keep track of interesting events. Then you can find out who else loves the places you do, and who else is going to events. You can also find local members, write comments about the places you love and more.

LibraryThing members rock. LibraryThing Local just opened, but for the past week we’ve let a few members in to check it out and add venues.** They went crazy!

Together, about two-dozen members added over 2,600 venues. The coverage is spotty, covering the members personal interests. So, Paris is a literary desert, but Chicago and Antwerp are a mess of little green and blue dots, and even frosty Juneau (pictured right) is done.*** LibraryThing Local would be boring without content, so everone owes a debt of gratitude to members like SilentInAWay (400), alibrarian (351), christiguc (302), Talbin (242), SqueakyChu (240), boekerij (217) and others for kicking things off so well.

This kind of passion give us hope that LibraryThing Local will swiftly become the web’s best, most complete source for finding bookstores and library—and for the events they throw. Unfortunately, we only got events working yesterday, so there are only 200 so far. Something to work on?

Authors! Publishers! Libraries! Bookstores! Right now, everyone can add events. But they won’t necessarily get to you, so go ahead and add your venues and events. We are experimenting with the concept of “claiming” a venue, so that a bookstore of library can assert control over its basic factual information. (You don’t control the comment wall, of course.) For now, you need to email us. Go to a venue for more details.

Beta, Forevah. LibraryThing Local is not “done.” It’s missing key features, like RSS. And it has a few bugs. For good or ill, that’s how we work around here.

The main planned improvements are:

  • RSS Feeds
  • Fine-grained privacy settings
  • Author and work integration
  • Enhanced features for bookstores and libraries that take part
  • More stats, like the most interesting events

I’ve started two discussion threads:

Needless to say, I can’t wait to see what members think of it. We’ll do our best to make it as good as we can.

Use BookTour! (We do not.) LibraryThing Local was something I’ve wanted to do since visiting Ireland a year ago and not knowing where the bookstores were. But I didn’t get serious about the idea until approached by BookTour.

BookTour is a startup founded by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the upcoming Free. Chris’ idea was to make a central site to collect information about authors on tour.

LibraryThing agreed to be BookTour’s first partnership. But along the way we ran into difficulties. We wanted strong venue information, so members could show off their favorite bookstores and libraries. BookTour is focused on the events more than venues, which include many duplicates. Eventually it became clear to me we were after different things, so we parted ways.

Although LibraryThing Local is now doing some of the same things, I hope blog readers will check out BookTour. I expect them to be adopted by other book-related sites and, at present, their data is more copious than ours. Certainly, no author should tour without first adding all their events there, and they have a very handy Excel-based upload option that will appeal to publicists with large numbers of events.


* Chris (conceptDawg), whose favorite bookstores include Bienvielle Books, built much of LibraryThing Local. Send praise his way!
**We released LibrayThing Local to a private but non-exclusive beta group two weeks ago. Later, after deciding not to use others site’s data (see above), we let members add their own venues, and later events.
***Best of all the Alaskan-adder, alibrarian, has no connection to Alaska whatsoever. He just got tired adding every library in New York City.

Labels: authors, book world, bookstores, librarything local, new feature, new features, publicists, publishers

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Free books: October Early Reviewer books

I’m thrilled to announce our October batch of books for LibraryThing Early Reviewers. This is by far our largest batch yet—12 publishing houses, 31 different titles, for a grand total of 578 copies to give out!

Thanks to the following 12 publishers, who contributed fiction, non-fiction, poetry and even children’s books:

See all the books and request the ones you’d like to review here: http://www.librarything.com/er/list.

And here’s a mash of all the covers:

The deadline to request one of these books is Wednesday, October 10th at noon EST.

What is Early Reviewers? How do I sign up? Where do I post my review? These questions and more are answered here, in the Early Reviewers FAQ.

There’s been some talk lately on how to score a book—so for the record, the basic algorithm is randomness, but other factors come into play. For one thing, LibraryThing’s matching algorithm will try to match up books with readers, based on the rest of your LibraryThing catalog. And if you complete a review—good or bad!—you’re more likely to get another. Finally, getting a free advanced readers copy comes with NO obligation. Under no circumstances will a bad review change your chance of getting another. More on this in the Rules and Conditions.

Labels: early reviewers, LTER, publishers

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Early Reviewers now free to publishers

The short version: We’ve made LibraryThing Early Reviewers—our program to hook publishers up with LibraryThing members willing to review upcoming books—entirely free for publishers. The response has been huge. We’ll have seven publishers and twenty-four titles this October!

The long version: We planned on charging publishers to participate in the program. Publishers were eager to do it even so. Certainly its closest analogue, the Amazon Vine program is charging. (Our sources say “an arm and a leg.”). Also, it takes work on our side.

Then we decided: What the heck? Pricing discussions took time and limited the reach somewhat. And we figured out how to automate the process better. When in doubt, we err on the side of openness. More publishers means more books, more books means more happy members, more reviews, and more fun.

We’re looking forward to announcing the October batch. So far, we have 7 publishers signed up, with a total of 24 different titles and 420 copies in total. It’s a mix of fiction, and non-fiction, with reference and even poetry books on offer. That’s a lot of books, and we think it can get even better.

I like to think of Early Reviewers as playing matchmaker between publishers and readers. The idea is a simple one—give free pre-publication books to people in exchange for reviews. But it’s surprisingly hard to find the *right* people to review the books. That’s where LibraryThing and the whole matchmaker scheme comes in. We match members to the books based on the other books in the library, so the books end up in the right hands.

For members: I’ve added a section to WikiThing with an FAQ on Early Reviewers for members—what it is, how to sign up for a book, where to post your review, and more.

For publishers: Introduction to LibraryThing Early Reviewers for publishers

We’re going to do monthly batches of Early Reviewers, so I’m always working on gathering more publishers and books. If you know of any interested publishing houses, send them my way!

Labels: early reviewers, publishers