Week Nine Work

Book Trailers To Be or Not To Be:

I totally agree with the Chicago Tribune’s assessment that there are an awful lot of lousy book trailers on the web.  This is an area of the marketing industry that has only recently come about and does have a place in book promotions.  It should be a no brainer to produce a polished product if you want it to reflect positively on the book you are promoting, so leave this to the individuals who are good at this.  I do watch book trailers and have seen some very impressive ones.  I was on the fence about reading Niceville but the trailer closed the deal for me and I ended up showing it to multiple people because of my reaction.  The New York Times article hit the mark in describing how popular this form of marketing is with teens and how easy it is to just go ahead and purchase that book you just saw a trailer of, because you are already online. 

As far as a reader’s advisory tool, I don’t believe that book trailers have developed enough at this point to provide our customers with a reliable source of information.  We don’t want to direct them to a tool that looks amateurish. 

Final Thoughts:

 

I finished! My final thought is relief! I appreciate all the hard work the committee did in providing staff with this valuable reader services training.  I discovered and reacquainted myself with many different tools.  Following blogs for genres I don’t normally read has broadened my ability to provide better service to our customers.  I enjoyed the teen assignments and particularly appreciated the readalikes chart.  The flow chart on subgenres was also very informative and I have added many of the titles to my Goodreads account!  I only wish we had been provided more time to complete these assignments as I found myself rushing through the material I would rather have had time to thoroughly digest.  Some of the assignments had so many pieces to them we should have had more than just a week to finish these tasks.  I could not have completed the training by the original deadline so I am grateful for the extension but would have felt less stressed through the process if I had known there would be additional time at the end to catch up.