Week Nine - Assignments

1-2. I read the articles on book trailers (bideos?) and watched a number of those referred to in the articles. The Chicago Tribune article was very negative on book trailers, to the point that I felt the writer lost her way in fairly reviewing them. Clearly a book trailer neither has the budget nor the clips available that a film does, and it is trying to make a video from a static subject, i.e. words on a page. The NYT reviewer of book trailers was more equitable, and acknowledged that her expectations for what a book trailer could accomplish were more measured. I believe a book trailer can be useful for readers' advisory, if they are seen in the right venue. Randomly encountering them on YouTube is not going to be good return on investment. The trailers need to be marketed to the right type of user based on their reading habits, tabulating their posts on Goodreads for example. Libraries and bookstores could use trailers as well to promote upcoming titles. The trailers can succeed in promoting and marketing the titles only when they are effectively produced and reach the right audience.

3. I believe Be More Bookish was a very useful endeavor. I had my doubts because I do not interact with the public on a daily basis, but I was pleasantly surprised about how much I learned over the nine weeks of assignments. It forced me to go outside of my reading comfort zones and to further examine areas of the collection that I rarely use or do not purchase materials for. I learned a lot about the various features of Goodreads, the many subgenres of mysteries, and the countless ways that narrative nonfiction can be used in a readers' advisory setting. I even learned that teen book marketing has almost entirely left the publishers' own websites and moved over to social media. All in all this was a really worthwhile program that I look forward to using in my day-to-day purchasing and librarianship.