Week Fifteen Prompt Response

There are a number of different, creative ways to market different fiction titles for adults. Some of my favorite ways to market books are with displays, flyers, and book clubs. 

Displays - This is one of my all-time favorite ways to market books in our collections. Currently, I am responsible for putting up displays in three different areas - all of which are supposed to be different. One is a movie display, but the other two areas are specifically for our book collections. This allows me a great deal of creativity to showcase parts of our collections that might not get as much attention as the Best Seller's lists or Hot New Titles lists. For example, one year, for Halloween we wanted to showcase some spooky nonfiction books, which admittedly don't get a lot of attention here and the collection rarely changes. However, me and one of my employees created a huge Ouija board complete with movable planchette and 5x7 printouts of books in our collection. Everyday, we would move the planchette to point to a different book on the display. Other displays we've done have been books on crafts, gardening, humor, Native American Heritage, and tainted love (fiction books on obsession and twisted relationships). It's just a lot of fun on our end, and I've found that it really pulls people's attention to books they might not have tried before. 

Flyers - I'm really a fan of reader advisory flyers. I've had to make several for the youth department and it was really a lot of fun to make and made me add quite a few new books to my TBR list. The goal here would be the same for patrons. I would take one really popular book, like a new James Patterson or Daniel Steel, and curate a flyer or list for patrons to take with them that would suggest other authors and titles, and hopefully help them find something new to read. This would be a way to target multiple different areas of the fiction collection, because there could be one for historical fiction, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, LGBTQ, etc. 

Book Clubs - My library has a book club marketed as the Any Book Club, which allows everyone to read something different and make their recommendations to their fellow club-goers. If something like this doesn't work, then we could create specially curated book clubs. They wouldn't be recurring, more like a one and done type of club. But, for example, we could announce that October's Any Book Club will focus on horror books and then make a flyer with some recommendations on some things club-goers might like to branch out and try. This would still give people the autonomy to pick their own titles while still upselling the collection of horror books we carry in the library. 

Bonus

Blind Date with a Book - This is not a face-value marketing tactic like the others. This is an attempt to get patrons to see beyond something - a title they don't like, a cover they didn't find appealing, an author they've never heard of - to discover a great new read they might not have otherwise. This is a really popular display with our patrons every February and I would like to introduce it more throughout the year, because there are so many people who just devour the books we select. We would steer clear of a lot of popular authors or titles, because those already get a lot of circulation. Brown paper or brown paper bags are used to wrap and there is a template we use in Canva that creates one-of-a-kind books marks for patrons to keep if they want. These bookmarks feature the basic genre and a small description of the book.