Book Sense Announces 2005's Best of the Best

This week, Book Sense is debuting the Book Sense 2005 Bestsellers, a special listing of the year's bestsellers in six categories, based on sales at independent bookstores with Book Sense nationwide. The list provides the year's top 15 titles in Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Nonfiction, Paperback Fiction, Paperback Nonfiction, Children's Fiction, and Children's Illustrated.

To make it easy for booksellers to market the year-end lists, Book Sense has produced the 2005 Bestsellers in six downloadable PDFs. The 8-1/2" x 11" PDFs are unique and exciting marketing tools that can be used individually or placed together to create one large Book Sense 2005 Bestsellers poster.

"The 2005 bestsellers were designed as a visual grouping of six individual pages meant to work together, as a sort of a poster, for a really dynamic visual statement," said Meg Smith, associate director of Book Sense marketing. "Or, a store can choose to separate out the children's lists. It's up to the bookseller."

Considering the list represents what have been the year's top-selling titles in independent bookstores, Smith noted that Book Sense wanted to provide booksellers with not only a list of great titles, but "a versatile marketing tool that can help booksellers drive sales."

Smith explained, "The stores know how much their customers love lists, and year-end lists are great for finding those books with 'legs.' There are myriad ways to use the Book Sense 2005 Bestsellers list in the store. In addition to grouping the pages into a poster form, another idea is to make copies of one or more of the fliers and make them available at the cash wrap, or to use a particular list as a bag-stuffer."

Furthermore, a store could display the year's bestsellers in a prominent location in the store, using the colorful PDFs as a backdrop to the display. This would also work well as a window display, Smith noted. "Plus, year-end lists are great hooks for local media, and are equally effective when they are included in the store's printed or e-mail newsletter."

For the Book Sense 2005 Bestsellers List in both PDF and text format, click here.

To use the PDFs to create a large poster-effect, booksellers should place the Hardcover Fiction, top left; Hardcover Nonfiction, top right; Paperback Fiction, middle left; Paperback Nonfiction, middle right; Children's Fiction, bottom left; and Children's Illustrated, bottom right.

Questions or inquiries regarding the Book Sense 2005 Bestsellers list should be addressed to Smith at meg@booksense.com. --David Grogan