Week 15 Prompt: Marketing Your Fiction Collection

What do you think are the best ways to market your library's fiction collection?

My college library spends very little of our materials budget on fiction, focusing instead on non-fiction and reference resources to support student coursework.  (And, in case you’re wondering . . . yes, it is a bit boring.)  The same holds true for our marketing efforts.  We tend to focus more on student services than on books.  This is one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed this course so much – it’s given me a perfect excuse to think and talk about fiction!

Here are some of the plans we’d like to put into place to market the fiction that we do have on shelf.  While our efforts may appear modest, we’re pretty jazzed up about the idea of showcasing something a little more exciting than textbooks.

·         Fantasy Display -- This winter we received over a dozen boxes of books from a professor at the college who reads and collects fantasy novels.  His donation included high quality titles by Christopher Paolini, Robert Jordan, Margaret Weis, Brandon Sanderson, and Frank Herbert, among others.  A co-worker noted that the colorful covers would make a great display to promote leisure reading over the summer.  The art department contributed a couple of student art projects – a painting and two small dragon sculptures – and we’re assembling a splashy display at the library entrance.  We’ll be using several signs scattered around the library with messages like “In the mood to escape?” “What’s your summer fantasy?” and (my personal favorite) “Ready to read something you don’t need to put in a bibliography at the end of a term paper?”

·         OTR Program/Display -- One of our librarians is a huge fan of old time radio shows.  He recently wrote a script for a “Boston Blackie” type of detective show and we performed a reading of it during the college’s Humanities Festival.  (I played Gracie the waitress, to very little acclaim.)  To our surprise, it was a big hit with students.  Of course they loved the sound effects like popping balloons to represent gun shots!  But several also submitted comments to the effect that they enjoyed using their imagination to visualize a character to fit the voices in the play.  We’d like to repeat the success of that program by doing another radio drama during Freshman Orientation week at the end of August.  Our cataloger has already compiled a list of library materials that could coordinate with the nostalgia theme – books on radio shows (Tune in Yesterday, On the Air), bios of great movie stars (Cary Grant, Ava Gardner, Bette Davis), and classic films on DVD (The Maltese Falcon, Bringing Up Baby).

·         Alumni Magazine -- We don’t do enough to market our library resources to college alumni, who also have borrowing privileges.  The editor of the alumni magazine is doing a story on the old time radio show performance, and I asked if the library could perhaps become a regular part of their publication.  We could list a few of the latest titles added to the collection – both fiction and non-fiction, or maybe feature a different author each month.  It would be a good place to market our monthly book club discussions and other programs.  I’d also like to think that a reminder that library resources are available to them would provide another thread linking alumni to their alma mater, which is a boon to the college’s development efforts.

Although the focus of our marketing will probably remain on library services, these are just a few of the ways that we hope to reach out to students, faculty, staff, and alumni to advertise our collection.