SABEW announces shortlist for Best in Business Book Award

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing announced the shortlist for its Best in Business Book Awards, which recognizes and celebrates outstanding business books published between July 31, 2020, and July 31, 2021.

Submissions came from publishers such as Penguin Random House-Crown, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, PublicAffairs and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The overall winner and two honorable mentions will be announced later this fall.

The 10 books the judges selected for the shortlist are:

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone;
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang;
Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies;
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis;
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell;
The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon;
The Devil’s Playbook by Lauren Etter;
The Key Man by Simon Clark and Will Louch;
The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy; and
White House, Inc: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business by Dan Alexander.

“In the last year, our colleagues in business journalism have produced many exceptional books that dive deep into a wide range of topics that are core to our economy and the companies operating within it,” said SABEW president and contest chair Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief at Investopedia, in a statement. “This shortlist represents the best of the best evaluated by the quality of the reporting, storytelling and scope of the books we reviewed. Congratulations to all the authors and publishers.”

The judges will review the top six books and in late October award a $1,000 cash prize to the winner and $500 each for two finalists. Authors will discuss their work during a session at SABEW’s virtual conference taking place Oct. 12-14.

The virtual conference, titled “The Future of Work: How these tumultuous times are shaping the global workforce and the way we do business,” will offer a mix of newsmakers, timely topics, skill-building and networking.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.