Three simple book promotion ideas for your school library

Here are a few simple book promotion ideas, which your avid readers, student librarians or book clubs could have fun adding to your collection.

Hovermarks

These are bookmarks with a twist – the downloadable template is a folded piece of paper with a “flag” at the top which sticks out of the top of a book, facing forward when the book is sitting spine on, on the shelf. You could easily make your own with clip art, add wording to personalise them and hopefully effect some happy book introductions to library users.

Hovermarks are an initiative from the Harvard Library Innovation Lab – have a virtual visit and see what they are working on.

Here are downloadable templates with genre descriptions on bookmarks, side on.

Belly bands

Though their name might conjure up exotic tribal dances, these are actually strips of paper a few inches high and long enough to wrap around the middle of the covers of the book like a mini dust jacket. They are also sometimes known as book bands, jacket bands or publisher’s bands. You can write on the “front” – and back for that matter, and then tuck the ends of the strips inside the covers to hold in place. Great for books on face-out display with a short note along the lines of what you might say if you were actually standing beside the library user and wanting to draw their attention to a particular aspect of the book – won an award, great read-aloud, so-and-so’s childhood favourite, full of suspense, if you like x then you might like this too. I saw one which said “Ignore this terrible cover! This is a great myth-based fantasy, like Percy Jackson!”

Perhaps the words could be tweets too?

Shelf talkers

This is bookshop jargon for the labels on light card folded in half, which tuck under the books and hang down below the shelf with a short sentence or two reviewing / recommending the book. You see them most often in those wonderful bookshops run by avid readers, where their personal voice and reading mileage shines through. It can be useful for libraries to learn from retail strategies – even using the search term “merchandising the book” will bring up some different suggestions for book promotion and “selling” in the non-commercial sense.

What I think is great about these simple strategies is the opportunity to add a personal invitation, recommendation, read-alike connection to a book which is just sitting there quietly, waiting for its reader.

Read more about reading promotion in your school.

Image: Book talker hangers, by Enokson on Flickr