Week Fourteen Prompt

 Marketing Your Library's Fiction Collection

The best way to market a library’s fiction collection is to put books in front of readers in a visually appealing way and use tools that make connections between books for the reader. This can be accomplished both in person and online. 

Displays

Creating displays that showcase specific sections of your library is a great way to expose your patrons to some of the wonderful books in your collection. Creativity abound, the ideas for great displays are endless! A few suggestions for great ongoing displays include:

Celebrate book holidays. Book Riot has a great list to get you started. Back in March, my library celebrated National Tolkien Reading Day by displaying all the Tolkien books in our collection and then set up a station nearby for patrons to practice writing their name in Elvish. All of the staff working that day wore elf ears which sparked many interesting discussions about Tolkien and his work. 

Use the National Day Calendar to celebrate topics of interest to your community. For example, May is Mental Health Awareness Month and creating a display of self-help books is one idea for getting patrons to peruse that section of your library. April was national Gardening Month and the obvious display idea is to put out all of the gardening books. Why not make it more specific and chose a type of gardening technique or area such as container gardening or vegetable growing and switch out these books on a weekly basis?

Becky Spratford of RA for All suggests making a display using the best books released in a previous year. You can make it interactive by asking patrons for their favorite book from that year and then highlighting those picks as well. 

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are an easy and creative way to make connections between books in the collection for patrons and provide recommendations. This can include books by genre, similar authors, or lists of books in a series. At my library, crime fiction and westerns are extremely popular and many patrons comment on how easy it is to lose track of the books they have read in a series. Creating a bookmark, better yet, a bookmark that also acts as a checklist, is a great way to help patrons keep track and are an easy go-to for making book suggestions to a patron who may be seeking out their next read.

Goodreads 

Patrons who access the library online may find great benefit in discovering that your library maintains a Goodreads account fully stocked with library staff’s favorite reads. Using everyone who works in the library to provide input on what they are reading is something that patrons are eager to discover and use. Advertising these lists in the monthly newsletter and on the website will help get the word out. If patrons are Goodreads users themselves, this is a great opportunity to open up conversations online with them about books. Book suggestions are one use of this service, but this is also a wonderful tool for:

• tracking book club picks across book groups at the library 
• showcase an author's work who may have just visited 
• to collect a list of local authors whose books can be found at the library 

Goodreads is an excellent place to gather past, present, and future information about the books in the fiction collection and what the library is doing with them. See this RA For All Goodreads post on how to incorporate this tool into your readers advisory service.