AAA: The Big Announcement

We've been sitting on two big pieces of news about the Amazin' Avenue Annual for a while now, electing not to announce them until we were certain they wouldn't fall through for one reason or another. While I'm still holding on to the big contributor announcement until we receive his piece -- it should be very soon, I'm told -- we can finally spill the beans on what is probably the bigger announcement of the two.

As you know, last year's annual was (and still is) available as a free download at AmazinAvenueAnnual.com and as a real printed book from Amazon. Early in the process this year we floated the idea that the next obvious step in terms of reaching a wider audience would be to somehow get the book into stores. And it'd be pretty cool to boot.

Now that the paperwork is all signed and we have to actually follow through on this thing, I'm tremendously excited to announce that this year's Amazin' Avenue Annual will be distributed by ACTA Sports, the same great folks who publish the Bill James Handbook, the Hardball Times Annual, and many other terrific baseball publications. The big thing our relationship with ACTA does for the AAA is get the book into stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, mainly in the tri-state area though we're also going to see if it makes sense to send some to Florida for the spring training crowd. So with any luck you should be able to walk into the NYC B&N in early March and see our book. And by "you" I really mean "me", because you can be sure I'll be stopping in every bookstore I pass to see if they carry our book. And if they don't I'll definitely pay a visit to their customer service desk to request that they carry it. I invite you all to do the same!

Working with a distributor like ACTA also means we'll be able to make the AAA available in all of the major electronic publishing formats like Kindle, iPad, Nook, and so forth. If you have a portable device you should be able to read the AAA on it. The printed book will also be available at Amazon as well as through ACTA's website.

As you may have already guessed, the one format in which the book will no longer be available is as a free PDF. That's the tradeoff here, though we'll likely be releasing a PDF preview of the book so folks can see what it's like before committing to it. You'll also still be able to get last year's book for free at AmazinAvenueAnnual.com, so there's always that.

Things are starting to come together content-wise, though we have a lot less time (three weeks or so) than I wish we had. There'll be a lot of late nights between now and then, but I'm really happy with where things are right now and definitely excited about where we're going.