W9A3 - Conclusion

This training was very instructive. I particularly liked two elements of it: the resources we explored all along and the review of the appeal factors.

Publisher weekly and Early Word are my two favorites resources discovered during this training. I still receive their weekly emails about recent and upcoming publications. They summarize the bigger news in the industry in a single page, and it usually only takes few minutes to be informed about new books and trends. If something catches my attention, I can simply go on their website to learn more about it. But there are other resources as well. Those resources are the ones I don’t follow regularly, but I am now aware of their existence and I can refer to them when needed. I am thinking about The New York Best Seller List, NPR Book, Indie Next Best Seller List and the different websites specialized in particular genre (Mystery, Romance, Science-fiction, Fantasy and Urban). The first three are useful when customers ask about new and popular books they might be interested in. As for the resources about genres, they are helpful to offer customer information beyond the simple book cover. Finally, websites like Goodreads and Novelist are full of information valuable for reader advisory. I find the public comments to be great on Goodreads. They are an easy way to find what readers think of a specific title. Novelist is very good for the read-alike option. I particularly like the Novelist search engine based on the appeal factors.

Appeal factors is precisely the other main expertise I gained from this training. I have heard about the appeal factors before this training, but I cannot say I knew them well. It was very helpful to not only study them, but also to use them during the weekly exercises. Now I can spread my conversation with patrons with words like pacing, tone, setting and characterization. Appeal factors give me tools to describe books in ways patron can understand easily. In fact, my favorite approach to use them is called the doorway method by Nancy Pearl. There are four doorways: story, setting, character and language. They are the major appeal factors known by customers and the easier to use in order to describe a book. I also liked how Be More Bookish made us use them, in a brief and short paragraph. I already wrote book reviews before for school, but it was in an academic setting. At work, people want to have the big picture in less than two minutes. This training made us practice those real life situations.

Overall, Be More Bookish was an excellent training. Like any online classes or workshops, I think one or two in-person meetings would have been a good addition to the training. One meeting around the third week and one around the sixth week for example. I think those meeting would have encourage group discussions and comments. Nothing is better than meeting somebody in person to break the ice.

W9A1 & 2

Pamela Paul’s article was published in 2010. At the time, she wrote that book trailers are “fast becoming an essential component of online marketing”. Five years later, book trailers can be found on YouTube and on publishers’ websites, but they are hardly essential to anything, even to online marketing campaigns. She mentioned book trailers awards called Moby givens by the Melville House Publisher, but they do not even exist anymore. 2012 seems to be the last year they were awarded. Our present does not look the way she predicted it.

The Nina Metz’s article was published two later years, in 2012. I think that year was especially bad for the book trailers, because, contrary to Pamela Paul, she did not have anything good to write about them. They were “cheap, schlocky, boring, lackluster, unimaginative”. Even the name “book trailer” is not good not enough for her. I think things have changed a little bit since. First, the quality of book trailers is a little bit better nowadays. They are more professional and visually more attractive. However, I agreed with Metz that reading is an act of “imaginative personalization”. For example, I was very disappointed by the book trailer of Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. Not only because the quality and originality was incredibly low, but also because the characters did not look the way I imagined them. Imagination is deeply personal, and reading activates the imagination in a subjective matter. Movie trailers give you a peak of what you will see on screen, but I rather have an idea about a book instead of a visual representation.

Personally, I think book trailers will become more and more present around us, but it will take some times. Time to achieve and develop the art of book trailers. A good book cover is not a simple representation of one character or the setting of a story. It’s something more subtle and more appealing (one can think of classics like Catch 22, Catching in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, etc.). I think book trailers should follow the same path, and create a distinct aesthetic. Is book trailer useful for readers’ advisory? Yes and no. Yes, if they follow the wrong path and continue to represent the story like a movie adaptation will do. Instead a reading a summary of the book, we could watch the book trailer. No, if book trailers become an art on its own and not a simple representation of the story. In this case, book trailers are useless for reader’s advisory but they can be a good marketing tool. Good marketing is not always selling the product directly, but it sells a world and an idea surrounding the product.