In 2024, we focused on delivering data-backed and feedback-driven upgrades to your Edelweiss service. We migrated key aspects of the Edelweiss site to updated (and speedier!) technology while refreshing our user interface to better align with the needs and processes of those buying and selling on our site. We also researched, revised, and expanded our advertising and promotion options to deliver greater value among these products to publishers of all sizes. In addition, we continued our investment in educational programming and resources both locally in the US and abroad—resulting in greater order volume, Edelweiss360 adoption, and increased Analytics data contribution across all markets.
We remain dedicated to serving publishers at every stage of the book's journey and working together to build a better book world for all. Use this page to explore some of our accomplishments from past year:
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Let us know about your experience on Edelweiss over the past year.
Upgrades & New Features to Improve Your Workflow
This year, we expanded our efforts to migrate the Edelweiss site to faster, more stable technology. As part of this project, we took the opportunity to update elements of our user interface to make it more intuitive and better aligned with the current workflow of book professionals.
Our revamp of the site's core List View (available on catalog, collection, and order pages) is now complete, and a beta version of this New View is available for testing by all publisher users and retailer users with buying privileges. We are currently transitioning other Edelweiss pages to this new technology and plan to wrap up those additional pages by the end of the year. All users will have access to the New List View beta by January 2025 to test out the changes and submit feedback before the New View becomes official in March 2025.
explore the new and improved edelweiss list view
We also focused on fine-tuning the user experience with Designer. Edelweiss Designer allows publishers to seamlessly create sales materials using metadata pulled directly from Edelweiss. Some highlights of our work include improved communication with PowerPoint, better document navigation, more browser compatibility, and additional font options. We updated backend systems to improve core infrastructure efficiency and speed as well.
create + customize with edelweiss designer
members of the edelweiss community
Maintaining one of our favorite annual trends, the number of active Edelweiss users continued expanding in 2024. Up 6% from this time in 2023, we are seeing a greater number of unique users engaging with our core tools. As of the third quarter of 2024, we now represent a strong and engaged community of nearly 280,000 book-lovers and readers!
Re-Introduction of Edelweiss Ads & Promotions
In 2024, we doubled down on data for Edelweiss advertising to deliver an expanded, more effective set of options for marketers and other publishing professionals.
This spring, we hired Jenn Northington, a former indie bookseller and reviewer with nearly 20 years’ experience in publishing, for a consulting project analyzing our ad placements’ performance and efficacy. Her resulting report laid the foundation for her coming on-board as our Ads and Promotions Manager this past July. Since her arrival, we have made adjustments and improvements oriented around data-driven performance metrics, including:
- Adjusting the prices of the B&N and ABA Community newsletter banners
- Offering Engagements as a tiered-pricing option
- Creating opportunities for bundled Promotions packages with discounts and longer invoice terms
We also launched Reporting in the Ad Center. Now you can see for yourself the Sends, Opens, and Clicks for anything you’ve booked via the Ad Center, including Featured Titles!
sample a feast of edelweiss promos
We’ve got two holiday discount opportunities for you to consider!
The first is our Holiday Promo Package Smorgasbord, a great way to try placements new to you at a steep discount. Get the below, worth over $3,000, for just $2,000!
- Top Banner ($1100; Excludes Weekly Greeting)
- Featured Title ($412)
- Title Banner Insert ($220)
- Featured Review ($770)
- Author Spotlight ($440)
Maybe you’d rather pick your own? In that case, we’ll take $500 off any combined invoice of at least $3,000. Offers are available on new invoices/purchases only, through December 16th.
Email marketing@abovethetreeline.com by Monday, December 16th EOD with the subject "Holiday Promo Package" and let us know the offer you’re claiming and at least one of the ISBNs you are planning to promote to get started. Both offers gives you credit to book placements in the Ad Center. Any unused credit for packages will expire after six months.
If you want to keep up with the on-going work around Edelweiss ads and promotions, we highly recommend subscribing to our reinvented Publisher Marketing Newsletter, where Jenn shares updates, tips, and best practices twice a month. You can also book time with Jenn—whether it’s to review your results, talk metrics, get recommendations on the placements that are right for your goals, or discuss any other ad/promo questions.
User Activity Over the Last 12 Months
We are excited to see continual growth in user engagement across many of our tools and services. DRC downloads have only become more popular in 2024, with 228,000 more advanced copies downloaded from our site in the last twelve months than the previous year. At the same time, user reviews of titles on Edelweiss have also jumped nearly 9% in 2024 over 2023!
new & expanded education opportunities
Our Client Engagement team committed in 2024 to offering a wide array of education opportunities in order to better meet users wherever they might be in their Edelweiss journey. Towards this goal, we published a set of self-paced training pages for specific Edelweiss products or processes. These pages support learners with step-by-step navigation through particular tools, plotting a clear path through our help documentation, while providing extra guidance on different applications or use cases to further leverage Edelweiss for their goals:
We also introduced a set of in-site learning modules ("Knowledge Centers") so users can explore more or get support without having to navigate away from Edelweiss. These Knowledge Centers currently accompany Edelweiss Designer, Edelweiss360 for Booksellers, the Ad Center, and the new Edelweiss List View for both sales reps and retailers. Users can call up a Knowledge Center from within the product itself to get answers to frequently-asked questions, access short demos, learn tips and tricks, and contact our team.
For booksellers, we launched an Edelweiss360 Setup Wizard to guide retailers new to 360 through the process of getting started on the product. Edelweiss360 is a free add-on module to Edelweiss Analytics for Booksellers that enables retailers to create attractive email campaigns in minutes. This powerful tool combines publisher title data with a store's POS and customer data so booksellers can build targeted emails right from our site. Our wizard allows for a seamless setup process so stores can jump right in and start using 360 whenever they’re ready. Since the launch, 100 stores have used the Wizard to get set up on 360.
New this year for publishers was our Summer Lunch Series, short monthly sessions designed to share Edelweiss best practices in an easily digestible format. This season focused on a common publisher education request, leveraging Edelweiss for marketing. The virtual sessions were structured to provide suggestions to users based on their level of Edelweiss expertise and bandwidth: we covered both quick wins and more intermediate options to make titles stand out and reach buyers.
In addition to these expanded education offerings, we were excited to deepen our industry partnerships and offer in-person programming on a variety of topics at Winter Institute, Children’s Institute, and all the regional fall shows. We see impactful education as key to supporting a healthy indie book market and hosted sessions focused on a holistic understanding and sustainable application of our services. And, we are pleased to see a clear uptick in ABA members on Edelweiss as well as growth in this group's engagement with our tools.
Retailer Engagement Data
This year, more indie booksellers new and old took advantage of Edelweiss tools to support smarter ordering, easy staff collaboration, and targeted email marketing of titles. Membership in the ABA Community steadily rises quarter after quarter—up nearly 14% from this time last year. Thirty-two new U.S. indie bookstores began sending us their POS data this year, and nearly 100 new stores across the UK and US joined Edelweiss360.
Initiatives to Promote Equity in the Book Industry
This year, we partnered with the non-profit Legacy Unbound to create two special issue newsletters honoring Juneteenth in the summer and Indigenous Heritage Month in the fall. We invited publishers to recommend books that aligned with these themes for a donation to Legacy Unbound, and we then shared their suggestions with our audience of over 100,000 book lovers and readers. Recipients of the special issue were encouraged to order titles from Legacy Unbound’s partner bookstores across the country. The response to these special issues was fantastic, and all publisher donations went directly to Legacy Unbound to support their Erasing the Margins internship program, by which Legacy Unbound seeks to disrupt patterns of exclusion by placing interns from historically excluded communities in paid internships in the book industry.
We also completed a second year of our Edelweiss Book Lists, a project that connects publishers looking to get the word out about their titles with retailers and librarians looking to fill their shelves with diverse voices. For free, publishers can submit up to two titles per imprint to themed monthly lists that we then share with our bookseller and librarian users. We have released topics and submission links for the first half of 2025 and look forward to another successful year of the program.
submit to the edelweiss book lists
Calls for submissions will be sent out in the Edelweiss Publisher Newsletter two months prior to the list’s month. Subscribe here.
Release Statistics
As part of our work on the New List View, we added many new features and enhancements to increase the speed, stability, and reliability of Edelweiss in 2024. We are finishing 2024 with our documented customer satisfaction score up 11% from 2023.
International Growth
International growth remained a high priority for us in 2024, and we spread the Edelweiss word across the globe via an increased presence at all the major UK and Irish bookseller events, the RISE Bookselling conference, and several publisher events.
The results? Fourteen new UK publishers joined Edelweiss in 2024, exponentially increasing the title data and DRCs available to our international users. The number of UK Market users is up 17% overall, and we are encouraged by a marked increase in this group's deeper engagement with the platform. The number of UK and Irish booksellers creating orders on Edelweiss is up 20%; the number of bookshops having orders created on their behalf on the platform is up 27%. Shared markups in the UK and Irish market grew a whopping 500% in 2024 compared to 2023, and use of Edelweiss360 by international booksellers increased by 25%. Last, but not least, a total of 324 UK and Irish booksellers are now contributing data to the Edelweiss community.
discover edelweiss international services
As Edelweiss usage grows in markets outside the US and Canada, we invite all publishers to get in touch to find out more about our international services and their associated costs.
International User Activity
In 2024, we invested resources into an increased presence at international tradeshows, individual user trainings, and thorough education of our global audience. We are realizing our goal of "single platform" solution for selling and buying books as the number of UK booksellers ordering on Edelweiss and the number of reps marking up catalogs continued to grow this year to greater highs.
Our Plans for 2025
new subscription management tools
We are committed to transparent pricing for our publishing solutions that accurately reflects their value to our clients and supports sustainable use of our services.
Coming later in 2025 are exciting changes to our Subscription Management tools, which will allow clients to make adjustments to their services themselves and to track the counts of titles cataloged per market over the year. We will also provide the ability to bundle DRCs, promotions, and title inserts as part of an annual subscription and receive a discount.
completion of the new edelweiss list view
As we conclude our work transitioning additional pages to the New Edelweiss List View this year, we plan to expand the New List View beta in January 2025.
At this time, all users will have access to the updates and the New List View toggle will default to "on." Users will still have the option to toggle the changes off should they choose; however, throughout the first quarter of 2025, we will strongly encourage everyone to give the New View a try and submit feedback to us.
We plan to retire the Old View and make the New View official in March 2025.
ongoing edelweiss designer updates
Updates made in 2024 to the backend of Designer set it up for easier implementation of larger feature requests. We plan to continue making improvements to the product based on publisher feedback and invite users who haven't yet given Designer a try to trial the product and share their thoughts with us.
Among features on their way is a new file and folder management system in the familiar Windows File Explorer-style. This will allow for easier organization of Documents and Templates.