In 2024, we focused on implementing feedback-driven upgrades to make your experience on Edelweiss more intuitive and reliable. We continued migrating key aspects of the site to updated technology, while incorporating your feedback on our improvements to keep all changes in alignment with booksellers' needs and workflow on the site.
We also leveled up the Edelweiss360 onboarding process to make it easier than ever for retailers to leverage the power of email marketing. Over 2024, we saw an exciting jump in the number of bookstores utilizing 360 both to expand their digital presence and to generate robust hybrid sales channels.
To complement these upgrades, we deepened our investment in educational programming and resources both locally in the US and abroad. In addition to wider Edelweiss360 adoption, we recorded higher customer satisfaction ratings, growth in site engagement, and increased Analytics data contribution to the benefit of all booksellers that rely on our site data.
Promoting the health and impact of the indie sales market remains our highest goal, and we look forward to continuing our partnership throughout 2025. Use this page to explore some of our accomplishments from the past year:
share your feedback with us
Let us know about your experience on Edelweiss over the past year.
members of the edelweiss community
Maintaining one of our favorite annual trends, the number of active Edelweiss users continued growing 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!
The New Edelweiss List View
This year, we completed a revamp of the site's core List View pages as part of our ongoing efforts to ensure Edelweiss is using the fastest, most stable technology. This project was a key area of collaboration between us and our users to generate a View that is more intuitive, reliable, and better aligned with the workflow of book professionals: throughout the process, we maintained an iterative approach and committed resources to soliciting booksellers' thoughts and incorporating this feedback into all changes.
Our revamp of the site's core List View is now complete, and a beta version of this New View is available for testing by all publisher users and retailer users. We are currently transitioning any remaining Edelweiss pages to this new technology and plan to give all users access to the New View once these additional elements are completed.
We encourage everyone to test out the changes and submit feedback before the New View becomes official later in 2025 and the Old View is retired!
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.
Expanded Edelweiss360 Support
We are proud to continue our investment in Edelweiss360, a free add-on module to Edelweiss Analytics for Booksellers that enables retailers to create thoughtful, attractive email campaigns in minutes. This powerful tool combines publisher title data with a store's POS and customer data so retailers can build targeted emails right from our site.
This year, we launched an Edelweiss360 Setup Wizard to guide retailers new to 360 through the process of getting started on the product. Our wizard allows for a seamless onboarding 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. That is 100 bookstores who have made it easy for customers to discover and buy their next read from them, their trusted local indie—whether physically in the store or browsing online.
2024 indie bestsellers on edelweiss
It is always fun to see the titles that rose to the top among the retail community on Edelweiss. Explore the top ten best-selling books from the past year—titles sold by the greatest percentage of indie bookstores on our site.
Interested in accessing POS data like best-selling titles from our community of nearly 700 U.S. indie booksellers? Learn more about Edelweiss Analytics here.
diversified education opportunities
This year, our Client Engagement team committed 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. At the same time, they also provide 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 features 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 publishers 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.
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 seeks to support retailers looking to fill their shelves with diverse voices and topics. Each month, we invite Edelweiss publishers to submit titles to curated, themed lists that we then share with our bookseller and librarian users in advance of relevant buying seasons. We have released topics and submission links for the first half of 2025 and look forward to another successful year of the program.
explore the edelweiss book lists
We share the Edelweiss Booklists in the Bookseller Newsletter two months prior to the relevant buying season for the list. Subscribe here.
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!
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.
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
completion of the new edelweiss list view
As we conclude our work transitioning additional pages to the New Edelweiss List View, we plan to expand the New List View beta for all users to test out the changes.
Following the expansion of the beta, 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 will retire the Old View and make the New View official in later in the year.
renewed attention on ccm
In 2025, we plan to work closely with publishers on Edelweiss to increase participation in the Edelweiss360 Collaborative Consumer Marketing Program (CCM).
Through the CCM program, publishers can sponsor placement of their titles in email campaigns sent by indie booksellers using Edelweiss360. Publishers who participate in the CCM program compensate booksellers for including their selected titles based on how many customers receive a campaign, how targeted it is, the relative focus of their titles in the campaign, and the quality of the email list.
To support our efforts, we invite all booksellers currently using Edelweiss360 to share the CCM program with their bookstore reps and encourage their participation. Information for publishers about CCM is available here. We have also created a fact sheet for retailers to pass along to their publisher contacts who may be interested in joining the program.
continued tradeshow education opportunities
Throughout the coming year, we are deepening our commitment to connecting with booksellers new and old at industry tradeshows. First up in 2025 is Winter Institute, where we will be offering three opportunities for Edelweiss education on a range of topics with our team and bookseller peers.
We also welcome attendees to make appointments with us for individual, one-on-one training. Book time to chat with us at Winter Institute here.