This is one of those occasional ShelfTalker posts that is pretty specific to booksellers and publishers, so you might not care to read it if you’re not one of those folks.
Last Winter Institute during the Publisher Roundtables, our group of 10 booksellers was asked about marketing materials that are most useful to us (and are actually used by us) in our indie stores. Edelweiss came up as a great way to distribute e-ARCs, and I had some ideas for other things that would be helpful to me as a bookseller trying to help publishers promote their books — and could streamline that process.

• Anything downloadable or embeddable — shelf talkers, book trailers, promo flyers, etc. — would ideally be located on Edelweiss. Individual emails are okay, but they get lost by the time the books come out, so having them permanently linked to their books in Edelweiss would be convenient for everyone involved.

• Something very handy, to me at least, would be Indie Next deadlines for each book noted at the top of marketing materials for books. To some booksellers, that might seem pushy, but it can be worded gracefully (along the lines of, “If you’re inclined to nominate this book for Indie Next, the deadline is May 15”) and would be very helpful to those of us who mean to nominate but lose track of time. Reminders help.

• I would love to be able to request digital ARCs and audio from within Edelweiss. If enough booksellers were requesting titles that aren’t (yet) available, there might be a threshold at which publishers decide it’s worth their while to provide them. It would also be helpful to have a better understanding of how publishers decide what to offer on NetGalley and what to offer on Edelweiss. I’m all about one-stop shopping for assets.

Anyone else have ideas or responses? If so, please email me at ebluemle @ publishers weekly.com and I will add your comment, name, and company to this post in an update. (Our comments section is still being worked on since the spam attack from a couple of weeks ago.)