NPR Books Grid: 12/3-12/9
Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink.
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TOTAL book stories for the past week: 19 (20 two weeks ago)
All Things Considered: 6 (4 LW)
Diane Rehm: 3 (2 LW)
Fresh Air: 2 (3 LW)
Morning Edition: 2 (2 LW)
NPR.org: 4 (4 LW)
Talk of the Nation: 1 (2 LW)
Tell Me More: 0 (0 LW)
Weekend Edition Saturday: 0 (1 LW)
Weekend Edition Sunday: 0 (1 LW)
All Things Considered Three Books … / Books to Rekindle Your Sense of Wonder
All Things Considered Kingdom Under Glass Jay Kirk Henry Holt & Co.
All Things Considered Best American Short Stories 2010 Richard Russo Mariner
All Things Considered Finkler Question, The Howard Jacobson Bloomsbury USA
All Things Considered My Guilty Pleasure: Sex, Drugs And ‘Life’ — The Year’s Best Guilty Reads
All Things Considered My Guilty Pleasure: Fire Hazel Rossotti Dover Publications
Diane Rehm Rope and a Prayer, A David Rohde Viking
Diane Rehm My Nine Lives Leon Fleisher Doubleday
Diane Rehm Room Emma Donoghue Little, Brown & Co.
Fresh Air Maureen Corrigan’s Favorite Books of 2010
Fresh Air Big Payback, The Dan Charnas NAL Hardcover
Morning Edition Happy Holidays, Voyeurs
Morning Edition Tina Brown’s Must Reads
NPR.org Book Club Picks
NPR.org Ship of the Line C.S. Forester Back Bay Books
NPR.org / Monkey See Favorite Books of 2010: Sex at Dawn Christopher Ryan Harper
NPR.org / Monkey See Favorite Books of 2010: Sex at Dawn Scott Turow Grand Central Publishing
NPR.org / Monkey See Warmth of Other Suns, The Isabel Wilkerson Random House
Talk of the Nation Best American Comics 2010 Neil Gaiman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Deals of the day
I think the brain fuzz is lifting, so here I am with the first non-NPR Books post in ages. As you are all too aware, we — authors, publishers and booksellers alike — have been racking our brains trying to figure out how we can use existing, emerging and evolving social networks and other websites to promote and sell books. So it was only a matter of time, I suppose, before someone jumped on Groupon.
Groupon, of course, is the site du jour: Google is supposedly chomping at the bit to acquire it, although some have questioned whether businesses can actually make money with it. (Although don’t ask me about the numbers because math never was my forte.) You may use Groupon, or any one of a slew of similar sites including BuyWithMe, LivingSocial, Yipit and Zozi. (Clearly not people we would want coming up with our book titles.) Or, if you’re like me, you might have bought a Groupon(s) but never used it. Then it expired and you lost the money.
This morning, Shelf Awareness ran a piece about a handful of independent bookstores taking issue with a large publishing house’s use of Groupon: in typical Groupon fashion, the house offered consumers 50 percent off their purchases. The stores were out of sorts because they felt this cut them out of the picture (since no bricks-and-mortar store can afford to offer such steep discounts).
Personally, I’ve cooled on these “daily deal” sites. Having signed up for what appears to be all of them several months ago, I’m now inundated daily with AMAZING DEALS! Every day!! Who knew I possessed the ability to ignore so many discounts? Or that bargain shopping could be so hard? (Although I do think interest-specific sites like Zozi — geared toward active consumers — can be slightly more effective in keeping users’ clicking.)
But what do you think? Can we use these sites to get more books to more readers? And is it more effective for the publishing houses or for individual bookstores to offer the discounts? Have you used a Groupon (or other similar deal) at a bookstore? Would you?
