'Mockingjay' Author Suzanne Collins Honored with First Booksie Award

Online, August 31, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Not every author is the cliche quiet introvert who has little online marketing expertise. Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Underland Chronicles and The Hunger Games, has won the first BookSwim.com Booksie Award for her marketing success of new young-adult title, Mockingjay. Collins is honored for her exciting embrace of internet technology at a time when so many publishers are ambivalent about it.

The Booksie Award was created to honor all types of innovation and invention in the publishing industry, in anything from printing techniques to character development. BookSwim.com will announce a new Booksie Award each week during Author Appreciation Month. Honorees, like Collins, are selected by a panel of publishing professionals and receive recognition on the BookSwim site and through BookSwim's content partners.

"I hadn't considered Suzanne Collins until people started talking about Mockingjay on Twitter," said Jeevan Padiyar, BookSwim's CEO and sci-fi buff. A simple internet search turned up the website for the series, www.scholastic.com/underlandchronicles. The site is not the typical author page with a few factoids and a short bio, but a stunningly realized portal into the Underland Chronicles world. "What really got us excited was the use of flash games to captivate an audience," Padiyar said. "In just a few minutes I was hooked, chasing fireflies through the Gnawers' Labyrinth and birthing my own Fishenstein with the Creature Creator."

Collins began her career in 1991 as a writer for Nickelodeon's Emmy-nominated Clarissa Explains It All and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. She received a Writers Guild of America nomination for her work on the Christmas special Santa, Baby. Then a meeting with children's author James Proimos inspired Collins to write children's books herself. From 2003 to 2007, she wrote the five books of her enormously popular Underland Chronicles. The series met with such acclaim and success that Collins was named one of Time magazine's most influential people of 2010. More recently, she is the author of the best-selling Hunger Games trilogy, whose first volume landed on the New York Times Best Sellers List for sixty weeks in a row. The latest volume, Mockingjay, came out August 24 and is already the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

About BookSwim.com

Launched in May 2007, BookSwim is America's only online book rental club offering paperbacks and hardcovers allowing subscribers to rent books "Netflix®-style" with free return shipping and no due dates or late fees. BookSwim offers nationwide home delivery of hardcover new releases, paperback classics and everything in between. Subscription plans start at $9.95 per month, with an option for members to keep the books they love.