Amazon’s Big Fall Books Preview 2012
Amazon’s famous for taking the long view. It would take a pretty long view for me to see autumn from here, given how hot it’s been lately. 
Well, they’ve now released
The Big Fall Books Preview 2012
and an accompanying
The editors as a group picked ten most “intriguing” books. Each of three editors also picked three more books, plus there are a lot more in specific categories.
Here are their ten most intriguing:
- Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (Chabon is the author of Kavalier and Clay. He lives in Berkeley, which is near me…and that’s where Telegraph Avenue is. This one intrigues me: apparently, the central plot is a small store facing the arrival in their neighborhood of a megastore…not bookstores, in this case, but music stores)
- America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t by Stephen Colbert (a parody sequel)
- The Twelve (Book Two of The Passage Trilogy): A Novel by Justin Cronin (sequel to a popular horror/science fiction novel)
- Winter of the World: Book Two of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett (sequel to Fall of Giants…yes, at time of writing, it’s $19.99 to pre-order the Kindle edition)
- Flight Behavior: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver (the popular fiction and nonfiction author writes a novel about climate change)
- The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling (Rowling’s first novel aimed at adults…not that many adults didn’t read Harry Potter)
- Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie (this is a memoir involving Rushdie’s time in hiding…I think this may be a book read more in the future than in the present, but we’ll see)
- NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith (a “tragi-comic” novel of life in Northwest London)
- The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin (arguably, Presidential elections have become increasingly about the Supreme Court…timely nonfiction from the author of The Nine)
- Back to Blood: A Novel by Tom Wolfe (another fiction and nonfiction author, the Bonfire of the Vanities author sets a novel in Miami)
All of these will be pre-orders…check the delivery date when you order it if you want to have an idea when you’ll get it.
I have to say, it was heartwarming to see that none of these presumed bestsellers from a variety of major publishers had text-to-speech access blocked. I still see that sometimes, but it doesn’t seem at all as common on new releases.
Also, I’m sure some of you have noticed how many of these books have “A Novel” as part of the title. I see people ask about that. Well, in the case of Kingsolver and Wolfe, that’s actually important information. However, that might seem to be less the case with Ken Follett, and we have to hope it’s the case with Justin Cronin (I don’t think anybody would want The Passage to be nonfiction). I suspect one reason is to make the title more unique for legal and marketing reasons. You can’t copyright a title (although you can trademark a short phrase). In Cronin’s case, for example, there are a lot of books that are called The Twelve or just Twelve. That doesn’t mean that Cronin’s copyright is for “The Twelve: A Novel”, but if someone else used that same construction, one could more easily argue that it is confusing for consumers.
I don’t think any of these were particularly difficult choices, if you were looking for bestsellers. They’ll all have considerable publisher support.
I may take a look to see if I can suggest any books for September that would be lesser known, but that I would find intriguing. If you have a book that you are really anticipating that isn’t on this list, feel free to mention it in a comment. I’ll have to evaluate it for advertising, of course, but definitely, if you are unconnected to the book except as a reader, that would be interesting to see.
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
July 23, 2012 at 9:53 pm |
And if you preorder, jot down the price you thought it was going to be. It doesn’t always get delivered at the originally stated preorder price. I recently received the download of a book I had preordered and was shocked to see that the price was $14.99! When I put it on preorder, it was not that high or I would never have ordered it. My personal limit is $11.99. I just can’t remember what the originally anticipated price was. By the time I saw the price, I had already read over half of it or I would have returned it and reordered when and if the price drops. Having gotten that far, I want to finish it. But from now on, I’m not even going to open a preorder when it arrives until I can check the current price.
July 23, 2012 at 11:03 pm |
Thanks for writing, Lady!
It is possible for a book to go up after you pre-order it…if it’s an Agency Model book. Amazon can’t guarantee those prices.
The simplest thing might be to do a print screen of the pre-order price before you click that button. There is usually a key that says PRTSC, or something similar on many computers. You hit that key, and it takes a picture of the screen. You can then paste that into Paint or Word or PowerPoint.
It’s sometimes a little more complicated than that (you may need to hold an Fn key on a laptop in addition to the PRTSC key), but that’s about it.
July 26, 2012 at 4:24 am |
I have a Mac, so I can use command+shift+4 and then click and drag to capture the part of the screen I need to save. I just never thought to do that. I will from now on.