Week 9: Summary & Wrap Up

Assignment #1:

I watched the Packing for Mars: Space Hygiene book trailer and read the Super Sad Book Trailers article in the Chicago Tribune and the Author Takes a Turn article in the New York Times.

Assignment #2:

I do not find book trailers to be useful or effective in marketing books.  Whenever I hear the words 'book trailer,' I think of those awful commercials James Patterson puts out.  I agree with the Chicago Tribune article, that most are poorly done with little to no budget.  Peoples' imaginations are personal and one of the main things they enjoy about reading is that they can interpret a book however they want.  I think this is why we often hear people say "the book was so much better than the movie" or "I cannot see so and so playing this character in the movie" whenever a famous novel is adapted into a movie.

I can honestly say that I would not think to use books trailers as a readers' services tool.  I think many people who love to read enjoy using their imagination and getting lost in a story.  An effective book trailer would most likely have to use some details from the story, which would take away from the world building in a book. 


Assignment #3:

I found the Be More Bookish  training to be helpful and engaging.  I believe there is a lot of useful information in this training, the hard part is keeping on top of all of these resources and knowing when to use each.  I hope that I continue to remember to use Goodreads and some of the other resources covered in this training and do not forget about them or let them fall by the wayside when I get busy.  The training did a great job of covering a variety of readers' services tools, while incorporating them into hands on assignments.  I did not have any experience creating and maintaining a blog, minus grad school which was only seen by classmates, so I really enjoyed this aspect of the training.

I think Be More Bookish would be extremely helpful to new librarians and should be included as part of the Librarian's Training Checklist.  It might be hard to incorporate because you need multiple participants to make it effective, but if there was a way to offer it once a year or so, new librarians could participate in it together and gain valuable knowledge. 

I would recommend decreasing the workload a bit, or increasing the amount of time given for each assignment to make it less daunting.  Because April through June is such a busy time of the year (SRC, school visits, Schedule 3W, VoIP, etc...) I would also recommend offering it at a different time of the year.  

All in all, I thought it was a great training and involved a lot of hard work from the Readers' Services Committee!  I hope that BCPL can find a way to incorporate the Be More Bookish moving forward and take advantage to all of the hard work it took to create such a useful readers' services training.

Week 8: Nonfiction

Assignment #1 & #2:

Read:

• Borderlands: Crossing between Fiction and Nonfiction in Readers' Advisory by Jennifer Brannen
• Reading Nonfiction for Pleasure: What Motivates Readers? by Catherine Sheldrick Ross

Watched Podcast:

• Readers' Advisory with Nonfiction produced by the Maryland State Library Resource Center

Assignment #3:

Sports

• 796's
• Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger - 796.332 B

Crime

• 363's & 364's
• Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon - 363.259 S

History

• 900's
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin by Erik Larson - 943.086 L

Food

• 910's
• No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach by Anthony Bourdain - 910.4 B

Assignment #4:

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets tells follows David Simon as he spends a year camped out with the Baltimore City Police Department.  This darkly humorous and violent piece of journalism is a psychological suspense and would be good for fans of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series or Thomas Harris' Hannibal series.  Homicide, combined with Simon's other popular novel, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, combined to form the basis of his hit HBO television series, The Wire, so fans of the show would also enjoy.

Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger chronicles the inspirational story surrounding a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, located in the center of America's football bloodlines, where football is more important than life.  Fans of sports fiction books such as John Grisham's Calico Joe and Bernard Malamud's The Natural, or nonfiction titles such as Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, will appreciate this impassioned novel.  There has been both a movie and television series, both titled Friday Night Lights, based on the journalism from H.G. Bissinger.

Week 7: Not Just For Teens

Assignment #1:

I found the chart from Lawrence Public Library to me useful and interesting.  I am a fan of the Hunger Games and teen dystopias, so this gave me some new titles to try out, such as Legend by Marie Lu.

Assignment #2:

YA Comes of Age - Publisher's Weekly (Oct, 2011)

I really liked the point in this article about how moving teen books away from the children's area helped increase the popularity of this genre.  It was also funny to hear that librarians aren't the only ones tired of paranormal titles, but editors are as well.  The article was spot on about the growing subgenre of Dystopia, as it continues to be extremely popular a year and a half after this article was published.

The Next Big Thing - YALSA; The Hub (Oct, 2012)

The stat which stated that 55% of teen books being purchased by customers 18 years and older (78% purchasing for their own reading) was definitely surprising.  While it is easy to see that teen books are becoming increasingly more popular among adults, I was a little surprised that the number was as high as it is. 

I commented on Julie Brophy’s blog:

I would not be in favor of a marketing push for a "New Adult" genre. It seems like a lot of teen books have increased in violence and romance anyways, so the delineation between Adult Fiction and Teen Fiction works fine. Introducing a new term would just make things more confusing for customers. I was happy when BCPL changed from Young Adult to Teen, so New Adult it not something I would be a fan of.

I definitely agree that pop culture and bestselling adult authors writing teen novels have played large roles in the increased popularity of the teen genre. I have seen an increase in the amount of adults asking for pop culture titles such as Twilight & Hunger Games, and teen titles by James Patterson, John Grisham and Kathy Reichs over the last year or two.

I also commented on Cayce Hoffman's blog:

I couldn't agree more, the term "New Adult" seems like a silly marketing ploy, similar to "Young Adult" which we recently just changed to teen because it is more relatable. I think the increase in popularity has more to do with pop culture and adult writers choosing to target the teen genre, then successfully marketing it to "New Adults."

Assignment #3:

Stacked

This website consists primarily of teen book reviews written by librarians.  It contains guest author appearances, video clips, and a helpful read-a-like tool called "You also might like." This is a useful website to refer to when looking for popular teen titles or discovering similar reads.

John Green Books

Teen author John Green's website is essentially a YouTube conglomeration of video blogs of him and his brother Hank from their YouTube Channel, Vlogbrothers.  The videos seem comical and touch base on topics such as Intellectual Freedom, animals, and life experiences.  John Green's YouTube channel is extremely popular and he is also active on Twitter and provides book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Booklist.

Assignment #4:

Harper Teen & Teens/Penguin Young Readers

Many of the trends with popular titles and upcoming releases in the teen genre revolve around the subgenres of paranormal and dystopia, many of which seem to be written in series.  After exploring the Harper Teen website, just about every title listed in the "Top Books" and Bestseller's pages was either paranormal, dystopia or part of a series.  The same trends were true of the Teens/Penguin Young Readers website, as many of the titles listed in the "New Releases" section fell under one of those three categories.  Another trend that is becoming more popular would be that adult fiction writers are branching off and writing in the teen genre because of its popularity.