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.