Over the course of this week, we will be posting the shortlist selections for our 8 business book categories: General Business, Leadership, Management, Innovation/Creativity, Small Business/Entrepreneurship, Marketing/Sales, Personal Development, Finance. Then on Monday, December 17th, we’ll announce the category winners, and, on Wednesday, December 19th, we’ll celebrate the overall winner of the 2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards! Stay tuned.

The selections for the Marketing & Sales category are:

• The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Master About the Business of Life by Philip Delves Broughton, The Penguin Press
• The Face-To-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace by Ed Keller & Brad Fay, Free Press
• Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action by Rohit Bhargava, John Wiley & Sons
• To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink, Riverhead Books
• Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell—And Live—The Best Stories Will Rule the Future by Jonah Sachs, Harvard Business Review Press

There are many myths about salespersons—often unflattering, or at the very least, misleading. Philip Delves Broughton would like to banish these myths once and for all. Delves Broughton’s new book, The Art of the Sale, skillfully strips away the mystifying veneer and provides surprising stories that redefine salespeople as artists working their craft. Daniel H. Pink would even go so far as to say that selling is something more fundamental than art: it’s simply an act of modern humanity. Pink’s To Sell is Human reveals the utter pervasiveness of ‘selling’: we all do it. Pink creates a convincing argument for why we should all embrace–and improve–our inner salesperson. Before sales comes marketing, and Jonah Sachs’ Winning the Story Wars presents an approach for marketers that returns to an age-old practice: storytelling. Sachs’ compelling argument tells us why storytelling is so crucial in marketing, and how to create an engaging and sales-inspiring narrative for your company. So you have a story—but what’s the value of it if nobody likes you. Rohit Bhargava’s Likenomics underscores the importance of how consumers like the companies from which they buy, and it’s more than simply creating an appealing narrative—this is real ROI-oriented strategy. Key to our likeability or the power of our story is how we communicate with our customers. Ed Keller and Brad Fay’s The Face-to-Face Book advocates for the balanced approach to relationship-building in the marketplace. Keller and Fay present real case studies of companies who do more than simply blast content to the masses—they look at how best to grow a relationship and select tools for communication carefully.