The Lawrence (Kansas) Public Library found an innovative way to celebrate Banned Book Week last fall when it produced art trading cards. Lawrence Library picked seven books to put on its trading cards from 46 submissions. Books included 1984 (pictured), Animal Farm, and Little Red Riding Hood. The cards gained national attention, and they’re still receiving more. Lawrence Library became one of eight libraries to win a 2013 John Cotton Dana Award, which comes with a $10,000 award, the Lawrence Journal World reported. Locals got free packs, but the library sold others online and sent packs around the world, including to England, Canada and...

As promised, ComiXology began sending out emails with personalized links to individuals who asked to be notified about the continuation of the Marvel #1 promotion. The email contains a link that can only be accessed from the email address it was sent to. The recipient has 48 hours to claim their free comics (over 700 in all) before the link becomes inactive. I just got my invitation, and can tell you the process worked flawlessly. All of the eligible comics are displayed on a single page. The are separated by specific categories. The categories include Marvel Now! Avengers, Marvel Events, Marvel Zombies, Punisher, Ultimate...

Two great reads came into my inbox this morning, one via Book Riot and one via email, from a blog called Picky Girl, which I have not read. The subject? Reader responsibility. Do they have any? Does being a 'reader' obligate one to perform certain tasks on behalf of the author? It was an interesting dialogue. Picky Girl (aka Jenn) began with an author tweet that read 'I am VERY happy you found my novel at the library, dear reader ... but do realize that if only libraries buy books, authors don't eat.' [caption id="attachment_82572" align="alignright" width="246"] THIS IS HORSESHIT[/caption] After her initial irk...

Rich Adin, a professional editor, has a thoughtful essay up about Read an E-Book Week. He says he has seen many complaints on author boards that authors' sales did not appreciably benefit from the RAEW sale, and he offers some reasons for why that might be (e.g., authors choosing too-small discounts; doing little-to-no promotion; not tagging their books so the right readers see them; choosing the wrong books to promote). The point that most interested me, though, was the issue of complacency. Stores don't promote author, Adin argues. And he's right: Smashwords had a special section for Read an E-Book Week,...

"The new BlackBerry Z10 is designed to keep you moving," reads the copy on the website of a new promotional campaign for the recently-launched smartphone. "So we've given it to three people who never stop. These incredibly talented and ambitious people are always looking for the next exciting challenge." Yeah, that's pretty corny. But I was certainly surprised to learn that one of the three people involved in the Z10 campaign was the author (and longtime TeleRead favorite) Neil Gaiman. (The campaign's other two artists are the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, and the filmmaker Robert Rodriquez.) But here's the interesting bit: As the promotion's website explains,...

We've been writing quite a bit lately about book publicity tactics, which is probably why a recent tweet about a Pan Macmillan promo caught my eye this morning. The promotion couldn't be easier: You post a pre-written tweet about a new Richard House series called The Kills, and then the first book of the series (there will eventually be four, and the first is titled Sutler) is automatically downloaded onto your computer, tablet or smartphone. (I just gave the promo a test run myself, and was surprised when I was offered my choice of a Mobi or EPUB file.) The Kills, as the book's...

“Showrooming.” While I can’t say I’d heard the specific term before, it’s easy to understand what it’s talking about—the practice of using a physical store as a “showroom” where you can examine something and then go buy it online. This is one of the trends many pro-agency pricing comment submitters noted in their comments to the DoJ, though in the DoJ’s response it was largely referred to as “free-riding.” As I mentioned the other day, a lot of people do “showrooming” in bookstores with their Kindles. However, it’s also long been a popular activity on smartphones for general-purpose...

I had never heard of this Ewan Morrison person before blogging that story quoting him the other day, but all of a sudden it seems like he’s coming out of the woodwork everywhere. I saw a mention on the E-Book Community Mailing List of a column by him on The Guardian. It says it’s third in a series, but I’m not sure what the other two are because there aren’t any links to them there. In this column, Morrison basically pooh-poohs the idea of social networking to sell self-published books, pointing out that if you’re spending 80% of...

EBookNewser reports on an interesting e-book promotion. The publisher of You Changed My Life: A Memoir is giving away free e-books of the title to anyone who goes (to a participating theater) to see the the movie based on the book between July 27 and August 3. Like the book, the movie The Intouchables tells the story of the relationship between a quadriplegic French aristocrat and the Algerian ex-con he hires as a helper. Moviegoers will get a coupon code that will permit download of the e-book from stores including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Sony. I...

Earlier this month I mentioned a blog post by self-publishing writer Penelope Trunk on how clueless she found her traditional publisher when it came to marketing her work on-line. The blog post was later carried by The Guardian in edited form. Since then, John Self has written on the Guardian’s Book blog about the (largely unsympathetic) comments posted in reaction to it, and whether it was possible to promote a book effectively on-line. To experiment with how effective on-line promotion could be, Self seized onto an about-to-be-published book he quite liked, Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway, and decided...

Here’s another interesting possible solution to the problem of how to promote self-published works: “electronic author cooperatives.” Writer Andrew Crofts blogs about them, and Alison Flood at the Guardian books blog also has some things to say. The idea is that authors band together to help promote each others’ works, though the post really isn’t clear on exactly what they do for each other apart from blog a lot. Still, promotion is really important in self-publishing, as Mike Stackpole commonly discusses in his panels. And this looks like at least as good a method of promotion as any...

Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel...