BMB Week 4: Goodreads

Goodreads is amazing! I've been a member since grad school, and use it to keep track of what I read. I also use another website, Librarything, to keep track of the books I own (over 700 right now, but shrinking!). Just a couple days ago, I got a free copy of The Pitcher by William Hazelgrove from Goodreads to read and post a review of. Hopefully I'll get to that soon.

I have one criticism of Goodreads. I have a hard time finding my real-life friends through the site, and I hesitate to link it with Facebook or other sites. It may be that my friends just aren't on/don't know about the site (they're not big readers), but I'd like to see improvements to the suggested friends tool.

I wrote about the suggestions I made for this assignment back in this post.

BMB Week 9: Book Trailers

Assignment 1

I watched a few book trailers on YouTube and noticed that the production values are widely varied, from semi-professional short productions to videos that look like the dumb ones I made in high school with my friends. I suppose that because multimedia is pervasive today, book trailers are a good way to reach people who browse YouTube and blogs at work or home. I find it kind of funny that books are being advertised by movies, and that the book-to-movie conversion rate is very high. I guess it speaks to our lack of time nowadays, where people may be able to spend 2 or 3 hours on a movie, but not the days to a week to devote to a book.

I do like that some of the trailers don't take themselves seriously. The Packing for Mars one, and one I found for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters were very well done and quite funny to boot. I'm sure they were heavily backed by their publishers and their creative teams. Others that I watched were more independent-film-styled and were sometime too serious to make me interested in reading the book.

Assignment 2

I think that book trailers are successful in promoting their book if they have the certain "magic ingredients" to go "viral" on the Internet. I'm still trying to figure out what makes a video go viral, but I think the trailers I mentioned above have or had a good chance. The other trailers that look like home movies I think are less successful, and that's supported by the lower umber of views on YouTube. As far as using them in RA, if the customer has the time or interest to watch them, I think book trailers would be useful in setting up the plot and tone of a book, and introducing some of the characters. I know that at a busy Info desk, I wouldn't have the time to watch whole trailers with customers, though perhaps setting them up on a computer and referring them to YouTube would be useful to them.

I once had a customer approach me at the Info Desk and tell me about the book he had published and asked about adding it to the collection. I told him the procedure and that I'm not the person who makes those decisions, and he insisted I watch the trailer for his book. The book was nonfiction and the trailer was quite interesting.

Assignment 3

I enjoyed this training a lot! The lessons about appeal factors were new to me and very informative. I think the weekly topics were well chosen and built upon previous ones. None of the assignments were too difficult, though some were very time-consuming, which is why I'm finishing so late. I would have strongly preferred that the BMB blog was accessible from home; I know many of my colleagues feel the same way. I think BCPL could have saved a lot of printer paper if we didn't have to print out each assignment to take home. My supervisors were also very gracious to schedule time for BMB blogging. Thanks!

BMB Week 8: Nonfiction

I love nonfiction! Whether narrative or how-to, nonfiction is my favorite genre to read. And to recommend. There's lots of info goodness in our nonfic stacks!

Assignment 1

These two articles made me think more critically about the way I recommend books to customers, and about the way I read them myself. In my readers advisory work, I'm going to attempt to cross over the fict/nonfic delineation more often, because it's nice to offer our customers that option. It might even be easier to recommend nonfiction to a customer who reads a lot of fiction because nonfiction is subdivided so finely. Some customers, of course, won't be receptive to this, but I still think it's important to try to make those connections across our entire collection.

Assignment 2

This video was really informative, though a little bit dry. While I new there were a lot of genres of narrative nonfiction, it was impressive to see 16 of them listed out, and my mind immediately started trying to think of books that I know about in each of the genres. The mention of "lack of appeal" factors was smart, although I've found it extremely difficult to screen for these factors in Novelist and the like. I'd probably run my recommendation through commonsensemedia.org if I had time during the RA interview.

Assignment 3

Narrative crime nonfiction is mostly found in the 364s. In this section, I would recommend Bringing Adam Home by Les Standiford, about the abduction of John Walsh's (of America's Most Wanted fame) son.

Disaster/survival is all around the nonfiction collections depending on the type of disaster. Krakauer's Into Thin Air is in the 760s with mountaineering, while Piers Paul Reed's Alive is in the 982s with history and the Andes region. I've found, for this genre, that searching by subject is a lot more effective than looking around in the Dewey area.

Medical narrative nonfiction is found with health books in the 616s. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a popular book in this genre.

Adventure or military nonfiction, depending on the time period, is found in the 900s. Popular titles like Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden and No Easy Day by Mark Owen are found around the 960s.

Assignment 4

More on this later.

BMB Week 7

Assignment 1

That's a nice graphic. It's an infographic, not a flowchart, because flowcharts involve a process or steps of action. It is pretty but it needs to be updated fairly regularly as new books are published and the "latest new releases" books get older. Otherwise, it's very informative and gives a decent sketch of what the books are about just by connecting them to a larger idea. And it's very cool to see that there are so many facets to the genre that can keep a reader busy for months if not years.

Assignment 2

The article from Publisher's Weekly explores the term "new adults" and how it originated as a marketing term but is developing into its own subgenre. I've heard quite a bit about "fiction for new adults" and have even read some. I think that whatever we call it (YA fiction, "fiction for new adults," etc) it fills a gap in the market, and it emergence reflects the times. Nowadays, more twenty-somethings are returning home after college unemployed and with lots of debt. These books offer escapism and focus on the second "coming of age" of the post-college adult (the first is during those tumultuous teenage years in high school, of which there has been no shortage of coverage in fiction). I think the "fiction for new adults" genre is also expanding because the books themselves are comparatively quick and easy to produce (a boon for writers and publishers), and quick and easy to write (essential for time-pressed adults and teens over-committed to extra-curriculars).

The CSMonitor article has a great line about "mother and daughter reading the same book" that I think is a very important--and rare--component of book marketing. Libraries, of course, are not as concerned about "selling" as bookstores and publishers, but  as books with cross-generational appeal appear on our shelves , we can encourage families to share their books, open up communication, and better relate to each other. That's a big part of knowledge creation in our communities, which is a primary point in our mission as librarians.

Assignment 3

Let's choose Forever Young Adult (which I keep reading as "For Every Young Adult"--I think this is intentional) and Teenreads.

FYA has a variety of contributors, from librarians to YA authors to self-espoused "fangirls." According to their About page, they tend to write towards young adult women. Judging by the amount and quality of the comments that each post garners, I would say that FYA is reaching its audience and engaging them with topics and reviews that are relevant. Some of the posts are even relevant to me (a late 20s male)! So I've really enjoyed reading FYA.

Teenreads really shows how YA authors can be proactive about engaging with readers through blog posts. Discerning the success of this site is more difficult because there aren't as many comments. However, their monthly poll results show about 200-500 readers are voting per month, which is not a ton of readership, but pretty good considering there are probably 50% more readers who passively "drive by." I'm hoping that both Teenreads and FYA have mobile versions of their sites, because that's really where teens are accessing the Internet, and it's important for each site to be visually appealing and easy to use, or else risk declining readership. I don't have a mobile device to check on this, but I'm confident the webmasters of the blogs have taken this into consideration.

Assignment 4

I really like the Teens@Random page. First, the design of the site is clean but still quirky and inviting, which I think will appeal to teens. There's also quite a bit of interactivity, like polls and Facebook games (most likely cleverly-disguised market research and revenue). The site also features author interviews and book trailers. I like the idea of book trailers, but they should be done carefully and sparingly because I've seen some truly awful ones. One trend that I noticed about new fiction from Random is that the covers feature an illustration (or heavily-airbrushed photo) of a main character, and that the readers can identify with this character because he or she looks like them (or looks how they want to look). Book covers are turning into artsy magazine covers. Not that this is a bad thing, since it helps us as librarians identify the targeted audience of the book.