Giving a Little Love to NF

Sometimes, when we think of promoting or handselling books to kids in our reader's advisory work, we concentrate overwhelmingly on our fiction collections. But it's worth giving some attention to non-fiction as well as we help kids. It not only increases circulation in that collection area but also is eye-opening and interest-opening for kids.

There has been so much attractive non-fiction published over the past ten-twenty years, it's easy to put kids and information books together. Just looking at the bright, attractive wealth of independent non-fiction titles, there's alot to promote.

[[True confession: I am seriously addicted to non-fiction. It has long been my favorite collection development area as well as the type of reading I am most passionate about.]]

We have had success highlighting non-fiction over the years that has tempted kids into trying -and liking - these dewey-ed books. Here are just a few ways:

NF Book Bundles - 3 or 4 non-fiction books on a subject that includes a bright label (Big Teeth; Strong People: Heroes; Science; Let's Build) let's us mix and match attractive NF from different subject categories together. These mini-bundles are fun to create and popular with kids.

Booktalks - when we booktalk to groups or at schools we always mix nonfiction and fiction titles together, often looking for a common subject theme. It's a great spot to include poetry and biographies as well!

Face-out Displays - Lots of it! As staffers work their way through non-fiction, I always encourage them to bypass the formulaic, series non-fiction and instead look for interesting subjects; eye-candy covers and titles that might pique the interest of kids. The more we replace a book in empty spaces, the better it is - it means kids are grabbing the good stuff!

Class or Day Care Collection Packs - putting non-fiction with fiction selections in packs that go out to daycares or classrooms is a great way to promote information books. I always look for short books with easily digested info-bits to tempt readers to pick up a non-fiction.

Stealth/Passive Initiatives - we make sure non-fiction gets a space in these. Whether it's pick-a-stick, gnomes on both fiction AND non-fiction collections, or NF included in Mystery Read bags, we make sure we don't stay fiction-centric in our support of great books.

Reader's Advisory - when kids are looking for books, we also check with them on subjects they are interested in and head over to non-fiction as well as fiction. Kids who love fantasy books often gravitate to medieval history books; steampunkers see how inventions are linked to their genre love; etc. And when fiction and graphic novels can't satisfy a reluctant reader, delving into a non-fiction subject area of interest often does the trick to spark some reading enthusiasm.

What has worked for you to highlight your non-fiction? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Selling UP!!

Marketing is not always a favorite part of our jobs.  Whether we lack confidence in our ability to write copy for our programs or find the perfect graphic for a poster or design an effective handout, it can all be slightly fraught. But one thing that we all can do, no matter what our talents, is sell up or personally invite people to our programs.

Lisa of Libraryland has a great post on February 9 detailing her marketing approach to get the word out to people. In it, she talks about the "personal touch" - actually walking up and inviting people to be part of whatever effort you are hoping to engage people in.

It's always a surprise to me when staffers assume "everybody knows" about a youth program. Sure we have handouts; media PR; posters; sometimes flyers to the schools; Facebook and Twitter. But that still doesn't mean people are aware of what we offer. Even frequent library users, with busy lives and multi-tasking minds, miss out on our info stream.

I can't stress the "personal touch" or "personal approach" enough. The staff at service desks and walking the floors are our best sales force.  Sharing information about upcoming programs; inviting participation; talking about initiatives can all help alert families to the fun the library has in store. These conversations in which we invite our families and talk personally to them results in more participation. It's surprising what a difference this makes.

We saw this again and again over the past few months while we were delaying our winter storytime start until we had hired our new librarian colleague (Hi Brooke!). We made sure we had plenty of passive programs planned - the Smart Cookie Club in January and "Book Bundles - Storytimes in a Stack" (learned from Amy at Show Me Librarian blog) in February.

When staff would get questions about when storytime would start, some would reply, "In March".  While all too true, there was more information to be shared. Savvy staff would invite people to be part of our Smart Cookie Club or talk enthusiastically about the upcoming storytime in a stack contained in book bundles. They would chat about the hiring of our new colleague and our excitement. They would explain that we wanted to see them in the interim.

Lately, I've encouraged staffers to engage more with parents who are reading to their preschoolers in the library and ask them if they are part of our 1000 Books Before Kindergarten Club. We have been registering many more kids into the program because of this personal invite. The parents are pleasantly surprised and appreciate hearing about this DIY program.

A little up-selling never hurts and always helps. So let's get out there and start those conversations with our customers!

Image: 'Little secret'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/20722444@N00/224674200 Found on flickrcc.net

Pop Culture Book Hooks

I loved the recent post at the Nerdy Book Club blog about taking advantage of the hype and publicity surrounding the publishing of a book to ramp up excitement in the library. I would also include the debut of a movie or DVD in this strategy to get kids interested in books and characters. And of course just linking in to popular series and trends that kids are interested in is golden too!

Over the years we have found that this is a great way to get kids excited AND to take advantage of material and activities provided by the publisher or movie studio to enhance the fun. And often, since the media is also participating in publicizing the book/movie, it creates a higher awareness among the kids and parents about the material and a ready-made audience for anything you do.

In past few years, there has been a bonanza of movies out based on children's and teen books. It's great fun to use the movie PR to link back to the book. Most recently, we (and many others in school and public libraries)  had fun with the Hunger Games. Our teen librarian got some movie posters available at the theater that added fun and a look of authenticity to her party before the movie premiere. When we did Diary of a Wimpy Kid (both movies and books) parties, we found Abrams to be extremely helpful with PR and activity kit material.

Book debuts are fertile ground for fun too. Many libraries participated in Rick Riordan's roll-out in May of his Serpent's Shadow, last book in the Kane Chronicles series heavily hyped through social networking sites and by his publisher.  My colleagues at Hedberg Library in Janesville just did a Zombie Prom to coincide with Friday the 13th and the general interest in zombies. Libraries have focused fun teen parties on steampunk, Harry Potter, Twilight. Kids parties and workshops are also abundantly represented - Captain Underpants, Pete the Cat, Fancy Nancy, -Ology  (based on the Drake books), Mo Willems and more. Book trailers, which are becoming much more prevalent, add to the fun.

By keeping a weather eye on and hooking up to what is popular and trending with kids in the book and media world, we can create fun events for kids that celebrate books and bring in eager kids to our libraries.

Has it worked for you?

Playing Stealthy Games at the Library

When we set up our summer reading program we like to create games that lead kids to different parts of the collection.  It's our sneaky way of connecting kids and books together. Kids who might never take a recommended book from our hand are wild about this "stealth" style of recommendation.


One all-time favorite game is the Mystery Bag Game where we bag up recommended books and let kids choose one blindly, check it out and tell us how they liked it.  It allows us to highlight fiction and non-fiction and it works great.

Another easy game is a jar filled with little slips with Dewey numbers on them. We ask the kids to pull out a number, find a book in that number, check it out and tell us how they like it when they return.  We choose numbers with large amounts of books (so 599s; 796.3s; 811s; 921s; 560s; 620s etc) so kids have a wide choice to find something they like.  We also change the numbers periodically as those areas empty out to give other areas of the non-fiction a chance.  We always hear from parents and kids that they have discovered new subject areas.

We also sometimes will set up a kids lit or fairy tale trivia game for kids. We'll come up with easy, medium or challenging questions to accommodate different age groups - we want all kids to be successful. We have three different questions per week and change the questions weekly. Kids adore it.

We also have an Early Literacy Area and Story Action Pod area that we encourage kids to play at and tell us when they are done.  While I've been on my summer library program workshop tours in Wisconsin and Kansas I heard from alot of the librarian staff on other games they use successfully - scavenger hunts; a "Spin the Wheel" to do different fun activities; searching the room for a hidden literary character; and more. Those ideas are contained in my Idea Sparklers posts, one of which can be found here!

What stealth games do you use in your library to lead kids to books and more reading?

Image: 'Three Wise Ninjas'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/34887679@N00/5570900386

Wimpy! Wimpy! Wimpy!

Yes, the Ides of November marks the publication of the sixth book in the fabulous series of everyone's favorite middle school slacker, Greg Heffley, and his always amusing exploits as chronicled in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Since we will use any excuse to host a Wimpy Kid book party, we threw a pre-publication bash yesterday that was easy, fun and very popular with the kids (and adults) that attended.

Key to our success is - we contacted the publisher for an events kit. That resulted in special game pages - but also in delivery of a stand-up display, free posters, bookmarks and pencils!! Thanks Abrams!  You made my job uber easy.

We started out having the kids put their names in a sock for a grand prize drawing for two Wimpy pens we scored as swag at the ALA exhibits.  After reading a letter from the author (part of the Abrams events packet) and talking a bit about the books, we played two games of Wimpy trivia bingo (also from the packet).  The fan-kids knew most of the answers which is what makes this so much fun.

This was followed by our....um, more active party games. Since snow, blizzards and icy weather are prominently featured in Cabin Fever, we decided to let kids "ice skate" on the carpet by stepping on paper plates and gliding around the room. Simply boffo.  This was followed by our ever-popular Manny Cereal Toss - kids got chances to try and toss mini-cereal boxes into a toilet seat placed atop a waste basket. This never fails to please the crowd.  We wrapped up with the kids dividing into two teams, crumpling up recycled paper into snowballs and having a snowball fight.

We had lots more stuff but ran out of time.  So kids took home a word search and Zoo Wee Mama cartoons to fill in the word balloons.  Now if we could just get those ten new copies of the book in and processed....

For more Wimpy Kid parties we do check here and here.

Promoting Summer Fun

Reading Suasn Baier's post over at the ALSC blog encouraging librarians in tight budget times to continue visiting schools to promote summer reading programs really struck a chord with me.  May is a big month for public children's librarians.  Many of us hit the road and arrive at schools to sell our shiny cool product - summer reading programs that encourage kids to continue to enjoy reading throughout vacation time. 

While I could happily be taking a nice long vacation - exploring the spring woods and hunting for wild ramps, mushroom and asparagus; canoeing around streams and dipping a line in the water for bright and lively fishies; adding pot after pot after plant after plant to my flower and vegetable gardens; or lazing around the deck and watching the birds nest, bats fly and rabbits munch - I know that the work done in May at the schools is some of my most important annual outreach. No matter what theme we use, I make sure I am at the schools, laughing, joking and promoting reading with my whole being.  It's an investment in time, a personal touch, that helps to make the connection for kids and helps to bring them in.

And in it's own way, it's like growing - or hunting or fishing for - readers so it can satisfy my May vacation dreams too.

Image: 'Gazanias - Flores de fuego'   http://www.flickr.com/photos/8991878@N08/1490596477

Digital PR is a Snap

We have had a digital picture frame at our Children's Dept desk for about a year now.  It has been a fun way to load pictures of our programs that kids and adults stop and look at.  We haven't thought about uses beyond this - that is until now!  The Strange Librarian has a wonderful list of suggestions on additional ways to take advantage of these frames.  We must try more of these cool ideas!

Top Shelf Magic

Yesterday a little bit of magic happened in our Picture Book collection.

When I started the new job 14 months ago, I was bummed to see that area jammed tight with books. We had a huge collection and too few shelves. The result was that an extra shelf had been added in every range so many of those beautiful picture books - all so tall and free - were shelved turned down so their spines were impossible to read. They couldn't tell or shout or whisper their name to browsers. They were hidden among their spine-out-look-at-me-sistah shelf buddies. And no one wanted them.

They were hard to shelve, hard to find and gave the shelves a raggedy,unkempt look. Families browsing for books passed them by. They were most uninviting, poor books, through no fault of their own!

Everyone in the Youth Department saw the problem. The need to weed was strong. But as a resource library for a system, we had to be careful on how we went about the process. We made a couple of decisions:

• We would start buying series picture books in paperback format only (Berenstain Bears; Clifford; Little Critter; superheroes; Barbie; Thomas the Tank Engine etc) to free up the shelves for the hardcover collection.
• We would weed heavily and downsize duplicate copies of materials that were not high demand.
• We would re-purpose display shelving, record bins and anything we could find to give us enough room to remove those cramped extra shelves and spread those picture books in this makeshift shelving so they could all shine.

The weeding was ongoing and we created the paperback collection to the delight of users throughout the past year. We were scheduled to do the rearrangement in the fall of 2009. But something kept me from moving forward on that piece of the plan. Too much, too complex, too hard for the patrons, too hard for our shelving staff. Then yesterday, it hit me. We had weeded enough! If we squeezed just a little, gave up a little face out display on each shelf and just did displays on top the shelves, we could remove that extra shelf and maybe the books would fit - all spine up, spine out.

So staffers pitched in and literally shifted the entire collection of picture books in a day. The extra shelves were removed and all the books fit!

Now they parade their beautiful titles to everyone, all standing up side by side. They look amazing, inviting and eager to leap into the hands of our readers. As the collection that everyone sees first when entering the department, we have transformed the experience of coming into our space. Now that is real magic!