Books to break your heart

We all know that every year – and probably any day now – book lists begin to appear. Christmas is book list central; ideas for Mum, Dad, the cat, the babysitter, that friend you don’t really like anymore but still feel compelled to buy for…

A while back on Twitter someone posted one of those “100 books you should have read if you’ve got any part of a brain” lists. So I decided (along with some online friends) to create our own lists. With titles that we liked. (We mainly decided this because we hadn’t read many books on THE LIST).

My plan is make the final lists available in the lead-up to Christmas as a more conceptually tangential guide to buying books*.  Add your own contributions to this and all the lists.

Here’s our books to break your heart list … 

• The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart
• A Grief Observed, CS Lewis
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
• Unless, Carol Shields
• How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
• Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
• The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy
• Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
• Paula, Isabel Allende

*We recommend that if you want a really good recommendation that is suitable to the person you want to buy for then you get in-store and talk to bookshop staff.

by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

How to introduce an author

Author visits and book signings are great ways to get book lovers into bookshops and when I spotted this article on Twitter yesterday I thought it was worth sharing with our Booksellers NZ members.

It’s a great read and a fantastic reminder of how to do things well. The story at the start was so awkward it made me want to leave an event I’d never attended.

Thanks to Janet Potter for a great guide and to Emily Perkins for sharing it.

Here’s the article.

Commonplace Book launch at the Women's Bookshop from our Flickr gallery.

by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

Connect Facebook and your website to improve social marketing payback

There are now 1.9 million Facebook users in New Zealand, close to half the total population and too many to ignore. As you’d expect, they’re younger—80% are under 45 compared to 62% for the population overall. That still puts close to half a million in the prime, older book-buying age groups and there’s a 55% female skew which suits book marketers.

Booksellers are beginning to embrace Facebook with the local standouts being MightyApe.co.nz with more than 36,000 Facebook “fans” for its page, and Paper Plus with more than 5,000 including Kerre Woodham’s Books and Bubbles page.

Books and Bubbles with Paper Plus markets the book chain with events, photos and conversation with 'fans'

For many, though, the only connection with their website is a “Find us on Facebook” link buried deep in the home page copy. And with time short, the resources you put into updating a Facebook page too often come at the expense of your website, not to mention your real business. In fact, it often feels like all you’ve ended up with is two websites.

The good news is there are some simple things you can do to integrate these two sites and improve the value Facebook adds to your website and your business.

Before we look at a couple of them, it’s worth recapping some Facebook basics.