Today I’m sharing three of the most valuable tools in my arsenal for discovering books, comics, movies, and toys to blog about and film shoppable videos and livestreams for. I do my research many many months ahead of time. I want to be the first influencer in my niches to discover and write, film and podcast about these books, movies, toys and products.
Many of us creators need to read books ahead of time in order to write or vlog about them in a helpful and useful manner. We need lots of lead time to plan how to get our hands on advance copies and do our research before beginning to create content around them.
If you aren’t a book blogger/vlogger or Booktuber/BookToker/Bookstagrammer, you might still find these resources handy, as you can forecast some pop culture trends a year in advance using these three resources.
Note that Amazon right now generally gives only a 2.3% commission for books sold on-site (meaning people who watch a shoppable video on a Product page) A $20 book will net you only 44 cents for the sale, so it will take over 45 sales of the book to break even. Will you sell one of that book each day? It will take a couple months to start making a tiny profit on that particular title if you only sell one a day. Just something to think about. You just hope that you’re able to sell multiples of the book each day. Not every Amazon influencer is going to want to create content around low commissions and low dollar items, but that leaves a niche for those of us who are willing to take the bet and experiment a bit.
BNC CataList –
BNC CataList is an online book catalog system for the Canadian book trade. Most often, the US and Canadian books and book covers are the same, so this is still a great research tool. You don’t need an account to browse the catalogs.
You can search either books (use keywords from your niche) or entire catalogs. Try it out, just for fun – type “disney” into the search, and compare results between the list of upcoming books sorted from newest to oldest, and the catalogs. You’ll see a lot of interesting upcoming titles, for sure. Sometimes you have to scroll down past books listed as coming out far in the future, such as 2080; or past cancelled books, to get to the good stuff.
Note that it can get confusing if a book title is really “new” or not. We generally begin our searches by using the “hardcover” filter. A book might come out in hardcover in 2022 and then be reissued as a paperback in 2023. If you’re looking for just the very newest titles, be sure to check for this.
Of course, instead of typing Disney in the search window, you could just have opened the Disney Publishing Group Children Fall 2023 catalog directly and perused their books that way.
You’ll need to know ahead of time which publishers create books in your niche or area of interest. I spent a bit of time exploring today and don’t see much difference in, for example, the books listed under Harper Collins Canada and the Harper Collins releases for the US (except Harper Collins Canada is publishing a Canada-specific title here and there, such as “The Great Canadian Cottage Book.”)
Catalogs and titles are presented in an attractive visual manner. Perhaps of these three book research resources this one is the best for visual learners.
You can use advanced search features to look for books with keywords in your niche, then sort them by Publish Date: newest to oldest. That will let you find forthcoming books to add to your content calendar or workflow. (For example, I see a Disney Villains cookbook coming out in July that I’d better beg a copy of so I can start getting my content ready!)
What can you do with this info? If you are a Star Wars Youtuber, you might add the occasional book content in with your toy unboxings. If you vlog about superhero movies and related products, you now have an upcoming list of books about Marvel or other Disney properties you can create content around too.
Bookmanager –
Bookmanager is a website resource normally used by independent bookstores to plan their purchases months in advance. Savvy BookTokers, Bookstagrammers and BookTubers use it to plan their reading schedule and content calendar. It’s a phenomenal resource for trendspotting as well as keyword and idea research and inspiration.
You don’t need an account to use the upcoming books search. We usually do Keyword searches, but you can also search by title, author, and publisher. We find the results far more robust and useful than a standard library system book catalog, as they don’t often list titles months or years in advance, and libraries don’t necessarily buy as many or the same titles as bookstores do.
There’s also an extensive Catalogs area that is way easier to use and browse than that of Edelweiss, which we will cover below. Use this link to explore Catalogues, which you can narrow down by subject. Choose the Future Releases tickbox to see upcoming offerings. For example, we look at Future Releases, then visit the left side of the website to scroll down and choose Hardcover, then scroll down again on the left side to choose the month in 2023 we want to see upcoming cookbooks for.
You can also look at past trends in the publishing industry, because some of the book records go back decades.
It’s sometimes faster for us to use Bookmanager’s Publisher search than to pore through Issuu publisher catalogs.
Some stationery, gift and toy items are listed here too, such as Funko Pops.
Do a keyword search for subjects of books that might be in your niche. For us, we type “cooking” and “cookbooks” and “Disney” and “Halloween” and “Christmas.” Use the “Future releases” checkmark to see upcoming books, far ahead until even 2025 sometimes.
I noticed listings for Disney books with Iwaju in the title, leading me to discover an upcoming 2023 Disney movie I didn’t know was coming out (on Disney+): https://disneyplusoriginals.disney.com/show/iwaju
Disney’s big theatrical release for Thanksgiving weekend 2023 is “Wish,” which comes out November 22. There will be quite a bit of merchandise coming out based on this film.
Bookmanager lets you see the Disney Wish books and media tie-ins slated to be published. We also saw Disney cookbooks, Disney Villains books, coloring books and Nightmare Before Christmas books. While books don’t provide a very high commission percentage on Amazon, we can use this info for content for our other social media projects. We can also try to use affiliate links from other sites giving higher commissions on books. We also use the research to plan out our toy content which can give us higher commissions on sites like eBay and Entertainment Earth where we have affiliate accounts also.
Edelweiss –
Edelweiss (pronounced “ay-del-vice”) is an extremely powerful tool used by publishers, journalists, librarians, book buyers, and book bloggers. It’s quite complicated to use – people even take classes on how to use it. You do need an account to use Edelweiss, but accounts are free. However, you can also use “browse with limited access” on their homepage.
Just like the other tools, you can use it to find upcoming media tie-ins that might work with your niche. There are better ways to discover new movies that are coming out, but this is what we use to find out the tie-in books, calendars and publications that will come out based on those films.
Try a search for Disney, and sort by publication date, then newest to oldest. Take a look at the different ways the same books show up on Edelweiss versus Bookmanager and BNC CataList. Edelweiss often has previews of the inside of the book that are better than the ones we get on Amazon. We aren’t allowed to copy and use those interior pics on our blogs or socials (they are copyrighted) but they help you decide if the book is worth your time buying, reviewing, etc.
Just like the other two book search resources, you’ll have to scroll down past “cancelled” books or books incorrectly listed as coming out in the year 2080 or whatnot.
There are many, many publishers catalogs to explore here in a visual format. Note that some publishers also create gift accessories, stationery and some children’s toys.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed in Edelweiss’s vast offerings – don’t fall down the rabbit hole and forget the passing of time!
After exploring these three book research resources, which one was your favorite? Let me know in the comments below.
-Creator Inspiration
@creatorinspirationblog