Barnes & Noble Books gave a fresh marketing push to its newest title last week with a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting Great Expectations by Sandy and Marcie Jones. Subtitled "your all-in-one resource for pregnancy and childbirth," the 700-page tome is organized by week. The company is not only selling the book in its stores and online but by mail order; the Times ad carries a mail-in coupon.
Great Expectations is the latest instance of B&N entering a reference-oriented niche that has been dominated by one or two publishers (in this case, Workman's What to Expect When You're Expecting). B&N's bet is that the chain's reach and the book's low acquisition costs (and strong backlist potential) make it a no-brainer.
Previous forays of this sort are numerous. They include B&N Books' baby name title, The Perfect Name (current market leaders: Sourcebooks, St. Martin's and Meadowbrook), which was released in October; The Baseball Encyclopedia (leaders: SMP's The Sports Encyclopedia and Sport Media Group's Total Baseball); the Barnes & Noble Basics series (leaders: Wiley's For Dummies and Alpha Books' Idiots); and Spark Notes (leader: Wiley's CliffsNotes).
What to Expect has been a perennial bestseller for Workman and is the first volume in a series that now has more than 14 million copies in print. Peter Workman, who founded Workman, declined to comment on whether his company would change its distribution strategy, given the new competition.
