Dallin's Readers' Advisory Blog

One thing I've been gradually learning about marketing is that it involves finding a balance between several things. First, there's the balance between marketing less used (or lesser known) materials and services, and increasing awareness and accessibility of materials/services that are already popular. Then there is the balance between marketing to already active users of the library, and groups that are not active users. Since it's not usually feasible to try to reach all of these goals at once, it can be tricky to decide how best to spend the time and resources required for marketing. Keeping this in mind, two of my three strategies for marketing my library's fiction collection would probably be focused on reaching active library users, and making them more aware of books that are lesser-known but likely to be popular. The library where I currently work has quite a big collection, but very low circulation, and most of our patrons are young adults, teens, and children

I would choose not to separate LGBTQ or urban fiction from the general collection. I actually have four reasons, and the first is impracticality. If I were to put together an LGBTQ collection, it would either include books for all age groups, or only books for teens and adults. The former option would probably upset some patrons, because there would be books with mature content located right beside children's books. Some parents might be upset to see their child looking at a pretty picture book with a rainbow on the cover, knowing that a super spicy gay romance was right next to it. But the latter option makes the whole exercise seem unnecessary, because if only LGBTQ books for teen and adults are included in the LGBTQ collection, children's books with LGBTQ themes would still be part of the general children collection. Thus, what would be the point of the separation in the first place? Also, fiction is not the only realm where LGBTQ themes exist. There is LGBTQ nonfiction, his

     The prompt this week is interesting, because the questions it asks are focused on adults, and the debate surrounding the legitimacy of young adult, new adult, and graphic novels seems to depend on whether these types of books appeal to adults. Does this mean that many people only consider a book to have literary value if adults read it?      While I think don't think that is a good viewpoint to have, I understand why some might make the argument that if adults don't generally enjoy these types of books, then it's a waste of library funds and resources to try to market them to adults. But the belief that a library shouldn't even be purchasing books if adults aren't the target audience is definitely odd to me. It makes me wonder if there is another debate going on about whether libraries should be spending money on materials for children and teens in the first place. My perception is that most people would agree the services libraries provide for children and