Harper Offers 20 e-Books for $20

This month, Harper Perennial has launched an e-books promotion featuring “$20 for 20 eBooks” -- 20 selected backlist titles priced at 99 cents each. The titles are available as Google eBooks™, as well as other formats, and the promotion will be supported by Harper Perennial with a marketing and publicity campaign that will include online advertising and social media. The promotion will run for the month of August.

Harper has created a special Facebook page [1] for the promotion and has featured it on the The Olive Reader [2] -- Harper Perennial’s blog -- and both sites highlight participating retailers. In addition to listing the titles with links to online retailers, the Facebook page encourages browsers to “head over to IndieBound to purchase from a local bookseller!” and links to IndieBound.com’s list of indie bookstores [3] now selling Google eBooks.

The list of titles ranges from Indie Next List selection and debut novel Postcards From a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber and the highly acclaimed first novel from Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil, a finalist for the New York Public Library's 2011 Young Lions Fiction Award. In nonfiction, the promoted nonfiction titles include two memoirs that were Indie Next List picks, Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography and I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Here’s a full list [1] of the featured Harper Perennial titles.

Jeanette Zwart, HarperCollins vice president, sales, told BTW, “We wanted to try an e-book promotion as a great way to get our titles in front of a new audience – the smart, savvy readers who may have already found our paperbacks and who are now also looking for material to read on their devices. We chose the titles specifically to reach that kind of reader.” She noted that Harper Perennial would be reaching out to more than 500 literary bloggers to feature the promotion and that the authors of the promoted titles who were active in social media had been encouraged to spread the news about the initiative.