Prompt Response: Marketing and Readers' Advisory

Prompt: What do you think are the best ways to market your library's fiction collection? Name and describe three ways you do or would like to market your library or your future library's fiction. These can be tools, programs, services, displays - anything that you see as getting the word out.

1. Physical displays - For me as a reader especially, physical displays are a great way to introduce me to new authors, books, and even genres.  The main library where I am a patron has a prominent island with rotating displays that work around a theme and this is where I am most likely to grab a book on impulse.  I especially enjoy season displays, but I also think timely displays related to pop culture trends grab my interest and likely the interest of other patrons.  I realize one limitation is that these displays may take time to prepare and who knew in February the extent that the nation would be obsessed with Tiger King in March?  But especially when we can plan ahead a bit, doing a display related to a royal wedding or the series finale of popular television shows can be really fun and hopefully draw people to books they might not have otherwise picked up.

2.  Curated lists for popular titles – In my circles, I have noticed in the past year that there’s a big group of readers that don’t get a lot of attention and that are the people who can probably count on one hand the number of books they read in a year and those books are all books that are popular in media or in their groups of friends.  These are the people who have all read Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens in the last six months but might not have read anything else.   In my circles, they’re the same people who read Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis a year or two ago.  For a couple of the people that I talked to in this group, I think a big problem for them is that they’re not readers and become overwhelmed trying to find their next book.  My thought would be to pull a few appeal factors from these books and create lists to help those people find their next read. 

3. Social media – This is one of the areas I see the most potential for libraries.  Celebrity book clubs and publishers are all over social media and the #bookstagram hashtag has over 42 million posts on Instagram.  I think libraries can do so much to market their collection and promote a culture of reading on social media and it should be an integral part of every library’s marketing strategy.  One of our readings for this week. I really enjoyed the points made about social media in our readings this week that any social media strategy should be social or interactive (Hilyard, 2010).  My local library started doing this over the shutdown by offering several afternoons where they did readers’ advisory via Facebook comments.  Also, one of my favorite weekly posts that I follow is where the Indianapolis Public Library asks their Facebook fans every Sunday, “What are you reading?”  It’s a fun way to learn about new books, see what’s popular, and I always get a kick out of seeing what backlist titles show up that I’ve read years ago.   While it is somewhat interactive because the library will usually reply to many of the comments, I really appreciate how it brings readers together to talk about books.

References:

Hilyard, N. (2010). The Expanding Scope of Readers’ Advisory. Public Libraries. 49(1). 10-25. Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.