Creatively Promoting Fiction: Week 15 Prompt Response

There are tons of ways to creatively promote the library’s fiction collection, but following are some of the most inventive ways I could think of to achieve this, ways that would really spark patrons’ interests, expose them more to books they will enjoy, and make my library a more collaborative place with a deeper sense of community.

The first method is to use social media to promote books.  My library (Hamilton East Public Library) currently has a social media presence (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram), and much of it is used to promote programming and to share fun things, like BuzzFeed articles related to books and reading. With the rollout of our new branding, we’ve started to do staff and patron book picks and reviews on the website, and I assume we will post these on social media as well.  To improve the library’s online presence and really use social media to its advantage, I think it would be great to do what Trotter (as cited in Hilyard, 2010) suggests and do reader’s advisory work on our social media accounts.  As she says, “Tweets [and other posts] have to be more than ‘we have a program tomorrow’ to hold patrons’ interest, and too many of that variety will make people tune out—missing that one program that might have brought them through the library’s doors” (Trotter, as cited in Hilyard, 2010, p. 13).  The library could do “If you like…” posts or tweets, or we could post book recommendation lists.  We could also retweet or repost content from the social media accounts of authors, publishers, other libraries, or book reviewers, with our library’s added commentary preceding the link to that content.  We could even post questions to our followers—for example, during Halloween time, we could ask followers, “What’s your favorite horror book?”, or during the summer months we could ask followers to name their top 3 beach reads.

Another great way to market the library’s fiction collection is to create “Best-Loved” lists.  These lists could include the 10 fiction titles that are, as the name suggests, best-loved by patrons, according to circulation statistics and patron feedback.  Each month, a new list could be posted, and it could be presented in three different ways.  First, there could be a large marker board at the entrance to the Adult Fiction section with the current month’s list written on it.  The librarians could either write or print and tape up short summaries of each title, as well as a note about the genre of each title.  Second, the list of titles could be printed on bookmarks and spread out in the stacks for patrons to grab and take with them.  Saricks (2005) states that using bookmarks as marketing is advantageous because “the reader can walk away not only with a book to read but also with a list of authors and titles to pursue on a later visit” (p. 144).  The bookmarks could also include the genres and call numbers of each title for easy reference for patrons.  Third, the monthly list could be posted (and boldly placed) on the library’s website.  Here, the list would include titles, genres, short summaries, call numbers, and links to the titles in the library’s online catalog.  Both the bookmarks and the posting of the lists to the website could be kept and archived for patrons to peruse later on.

My last idea for fiction promotion is my favorite.  I got this idea from the cataloging system at the Garden Library in Tel Aviv, Israel.  Rather than shelving books using conventional methods, the library categorizes books by emotional response. Once they’ve read a book, patrons are asked to mark on a sticker on the back cover which of seven color-coded emotions the book evoked for them: amusing, boring, bizarre, depressing, exciting, inspiring, or sentimental. Each reader’s response is added to the history of the book’s responses on the book’s spine, and then the book is shelved according to the most recent response.  My thought is to use this idea to provide passive reader’s advisory on the part of the librarians and active RA on the part of the patrons.  The logistics of setting this up in my library would be difficult to pin down…the Garden Library only has about 3,500 titles compared to HEPL’s total collection of over 360,000 print materials.  However, I think that starting small, maybe with our new fiction titles, could provide a good starting point that could eventually move to include a great deal of the fiction collection as a whole.  Each book could include a chart on the inside back cover where patrons can note their emotional response to the book.  As responses amass, the librarians could place color-coded stickers (similar to the Garden Library’s stickers) on the spine or back of each book.  A chart could be placed throughout the stacks to tell patrons what each color means and to encourage patrons to add their response after reading a book.  (Note: Books would still be shelved as they are now but, like the genre stickers we put on fiction titles, these emotional response stickers would just be an added feature to clue patrons in on the content of a book.)  Patrons frequently tell us at the circulation desk whether a book was great or terrible, and they love to give us their input about what they read.  These color-coded emotional response stickers could be a fantastic way for patrons to leave their input for the whole library community to see (anonymously, of course), and for patrons to learn from each other about books they might enjoy.  Most patrons aren’t privy to our librarian lingo regarding appeal terms, so letting them have the chance to essentially rate books based on emotional response provides an easier understanding of what a book might be like.  Most importantly, this allows patrons to play an active role in our reader’s advisory service.


References

Hilyard, N. (2010). The expanding scope of readers’ advisory. Public Libraries, 49(1), 10-25.

Saricks, J. (2005). Promoting and marketing readers’ advisory collections and services. In
Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library (pp.136-160). Chicago: ALA.