News

Bookswarm has created a new look for the website of the British Sports Book Awards, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year in style with a dinner at the prestigious Savoy Hotel in London on 21st May. The star studded event will celebrate the very best in sports book publishing from the last year with new awards being added to the line up. This year there will also be a special award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Sports Writing’ that will be presented this year to Nick Hornby, author of the ground-breaking novel ‘Fever Pitch’.

As well as redesigning the site we also migrated it to our favourite Content Management System, WordPress – so now the BSBA team are in total control of their content.

Visit the new website

In preparation for the paperback release of her novel The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs, and the follow-up in July, Just Like Proper Grown-Ups, Bookswarm has revamped the website of author Christina Hopkinson. Christina wanted something classy, elegant and understated – we hope you’ll agree that’s what she got!

Visit the new-look site

Bookswarm’s Simon Appleby will be on the panel for the inaugural Publishing Now event on 2-3 December 2011.

Exciting times in the world of publishing. The concept of the book is being re-imagined and re-wrought, the act of reading is undergoing enhancement and renovation. We’re no longer looking at possibilities in the future; innovation is alive, present, here, now, raring to go and accelerating fast.

That’s why we have based our conference around the theme of ‘innovation’ – throughout the weekend you’ll have the opportunity to learn, discuss, debate and explore innovation in publishing.

Simon will be participating in the Friday night session, which will have a live Twitter wall behind the panel (#talkingrubbish? We hope not!).

Book tickets here

The latest author site to be launched is for New York Times bestselling author Raymond Khoury, whose novels include The Last Templar and the recent follow-up The Templar Salvation. It’s all based on WordPress so Raymond’s already fully in control of his own content – and Bookswarm also built him a mini-website, also WordPress-based, that is embedded in his official Facebook page to provide fans with more information about the books.

Take a look at the new site

The Guardian on Saturday 1st October featured an Independent Bookshops Directory and a free Love Your Indie loyalty card. These special cards offer holders a 20% discount on their first purchase at any one of the retailers participating in the scheme.

Bookswarm devised the mechanics of the scheme and designed and built the website as well as all of the promotional materials – posters, bookmarks, window stickers and web banners.

www.loveyourindie.co.uk

We’re pleased to announce the launch of Ali Knight’s official author website – based on a custom WordPress theme designed and implemented by Bookswarm. Ali’s debut novel, Wink Murder, was published by Hodder & Stoughton earlier this year and shortly comes out in paperback. The site, made welcoming though it is by Rankin’s splendid photo of Ali on the home page, deliberately has ‘something of the night’ about it.

Visit the site

As reported on The Bookseller’s website today, The Independent Alliance has launched a nationwide loyalty card scheme for independent bookshops, with 114 indies signed up so far – and Bookswarm has been central to the delivery of the project.

Love Your Indie, which will be run in association with the Guardian and Observer as part of their Books Season, has been put together by Faber marketing director Joanna Ellis and Icon Books sales and marketing director Andrew Furlow, working with Bookswarm’s Operations Director Simon Appleby.

Customers receive a stamp for every £10 they spend in the participating shops. Once they have collected 10 stamps, they can then pick a free book from a selection provided by Independent Alliance publishers.

More than half a million blank Love Your Indie loyalty cards will be distributed with the Guardian on Saturday 1st October, giving customers a 20% discount on their first purchase of any books in participating shops until mid-November. Retailers will register and verify customers’ cards on www.loveyourindie.co.uk, and posters, bookmarks, window stickers and extra loyalty cards have been posted to participating retailers ahead of launch.

Faber sales and marketing director Will Atkinson said: “The Independent Alliance has a close and extremely fruitful relationship with independent booksellers, one that we value enormously. We were keen to find a way to help them encourage more and more book lovers to come through their doors, and to spend money when they do so. Thanks to the association with the Guardian, this is exactly what the Love Your Indie scheme does and we’re delighted to be launching it at the start of October.”

Vivian Archer of Newham Bookshop, which is signed up to the scheme, said: “The card is exactly what the independent sector needs to drive people into our shops and remind them why nothing beats the brilliant service, lovingly selected range, and ambience that only independent booksellers can provide. I look forward to our customers using the card for years.”

The book publishing trade has passed the digital tipping point – no, the majority of trade publishing may not yet be electronic, but as an industry, there cannot be many of us who have not been exposed to digital publishing, thought about it, or talked about it, and it’s impact is being felt by retailers too. E-books, e-readers and smaphones are mainstream. If you accept that’s the case, maybe it’s time we made ‘digital’ a dirty word.

Think about how often the d-word is used – and then think about how often a more specific, nuanced term could have been used instead.

In a trade that, like most industries, has an incredible vocabulary of jargon, the d-word stands out as being used to mean any number of things in any number of settings. It can mean e-books, apps, websites, databases and so much more. This is deeply unhelpful and a genuine barrier to wider understanding.

Only by eradication of such terminological inexactitude can we actually start to have meaningful discussions throughout publishing. New entrants to the business are expected to learn about blads, presenters, ARCs, ISBNs, flaps, and RAP dates, so it makes no sense for knowledge of ePub, DRM, metadata, XML and JavaScript to be marginalised to digital departments.

Only once whole businesses have a proper understanding of the possibilities and pitfalls in the creation, storage and delivery of content by a variety of electronic means (see what I did there?) can we really push on and make great user experiences that delight, entrance and educate their users. So next time a colleague says ‘digital’, pass them the swear box, get them to pay up and then ask them what they really mean.

This post first appeared on FutureBook. Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wmjas/148141867/

Something rather more sedate and peaceful to report on now: the launch of Marcel Theroux’s new site. He wanted something calming that reflected his interests without being an ego trip – so we created line drawings based on details his study at home.

Visit the site

Bookswarm’s latest project has taken to the skies today – a new blog for Faber’s fabulous Faber Finds imprint.

Faber Finds | The Place for Lost Books

When Faber decided to move across from a blog hosted on WordPress.com, they asked Bookswarm to create a bespoke new theme to reflect the new jacket designs for these lovely print-on-demand books – all designed, tweaked, built and launched in under two weeks!