Week 15 Prompt

When you think of a public library, a lot of time, the first thing that will come to someone’s mind is the word ‘books’. Specifically, fiction books. As such, it is not instinctive for us, as librarians, to think of the need for advertising in fiction books. Why should we when they are the most commonly checked out material? What is often overlooked, though, is that while big name authors or series might not need to be advertised, there are many amazing novels, written by lesser-known authors, which are not on our patrons radars. As such, it is our job as librarians to open up to our patrons the entire world of fiction that the library provides to them.  There are many possibilities for this type of fiction advertising, but below are a few of my favorites that I use in my own library.

Read-Alike Promotional Materials:

Although we often have services such as novelist at our disposal for those tricky RA circumstances where a patron will put you on the spot asking for a read-alike of the book they just finished, it can be invaluable to have pre-made read-alike pamphlets and posters at the ready. For example, with my own library, we have selected ten authors from each of our genres that we know our patrons read religiously, and have hand selected a list of authors that have similar characteristics to the popular, well-loved author. In this manner, we not only have suggestions for our patrons that burn through an authors published work at rapid speed, but we are also exposing those patrons to new or relatively unknown authors that were not previously on their radar.

Live, Virtual Book Talks:  

With ever improving technology to aid in our endeavors as librarians, it is only natural that we would take advantage of new capabilities. One that applies to featuring and advertising new adult fiction materials is the capability to have live book talks on our Facebook page. Once a month, our adult circulation staff will select a set number of books to feature for the live book talk, and they will discuss the plot, the genre, and other appeal factors of each novel. Often these novels will be ones that are brand new to the libraries shelves, and feature a mix of well-known and up and coming authors. The brilliant nature of this type of advertising, is that not only are people able to interact with our librarians through live commenting as the book talk is occurring, but that also the video will post to our FB page at the conclusion and patrons that missed the live version are still able to view the video.

Weekly Patron/Staff Recommendations:

At my own library, we have not only voracious readers on our staff, but also in our patron base that love to read anything and everything, while also sharing with others their opinions. For this reason, we have a rotating staff and patron recommendation section on our website and on our social media accounts; these recommendations are upadated on a weekly basis. For our staff, we collect their reading recommendations as they are ready, and for our patrons we distribute review cards when they check out materials. If the patron is so inclined, they will fill out the review card for the novel in question. It is from these review cards that we pull patron recommendations for our weekly rotation of staff and patron recommendations on our website and social media. Patrons now specifically seek out these new reviews on Mondays, when they know that new ones will be posted.

As I said before, there are many options beyond these, these are simply what have worked for my own library in increasing the circulation rates in our adult fiction collections.