Wi14 Education Idea Exchange: Marketing to Genre Readers

Booksellers at the American Booksellers Association’s recent Winter Institute discussed marketing, merchandising, events, and more during a roundtable focused on genre titles. Here are the notes from the brainstorming session:

GENRE-SPECIFIC TIPS

YA AND TEEN MARKETING

How to get teens into stores:

• Partner with teachers and local schools
  • Join efforts like Project LIT, which works to bring culturally relevant titles into schools across the country
• Host a book club for exclusively for teens or establish a teen advisory board, where teens meet regularly, write shelf-talkers, review ARCs, and spread the word among friends at school
• Partner with organizations or other stores that have strong teen following to tap into their established audience
• Host NaNoWriMo/Write the Night Off events
• Host ticketed events and workshops
• Don’t forget food and refreshments!

ROMANCE

Strategies to identify upcoming titles and how to promote them:

• Reach out to sales reps
• Check out Sourcebooks’ 15-book starter set for bookshops that want to introduce a romance section in their store; ask other publishers for suggestions as well
• Join the Romance of Bookselling Facebook group, where indie booksellers talk about titles they love and work to break the stigma the genre suffers in the bookselling world
• Reach out to the local chapter of Romance Writers of America
• Invite a local romance writer curate a shelf or display in the store
• Put a jar on the romance shelf with a survey that asks what subgenres and titles customers would like to see; answers can be anonymous
• Host a romance-focused book club
• Promote upcoming titles via pre-order campaigns

FOR ANY GENRE

SHELVING AND DISPLAYS

• Use themed props, such as feather boas, puppets, or plush, to decorate sections
• Curate displays around the new season of a TV show, a new movie, or other forms of media
• Post signage that says, “If you liked [title], check out this!”
• Make displays for genre-specific awards, such as the Edgar Awards
• Leave a note, similar to a shelf-talker, in sections that have popular titles with cross-genre appeal: “If you’re looking for [this title], we’ve stocked it in [this section]”

STEPPING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE AND ENCOURAGING COLLEAGUES TO SELL GENRE TITLES

• Host regular meetings to discuss upcoming titles, which helps introduces books to booksellers who might not read certain genres. These meetings don’t have to be in-store; stores can host meetings at a local restaurant or bar to talk about books
• Set up a private Facebook page for staff where they can share their current reads and suggestions, or use services such as Slack or Basecamp to talk about book suggestions
• On Edelweiss, make notes for internal suggestion; send the Edelweiss link to the notes for each genre section to the rest of the staff and remember to report titles to the Indie Next List, Libro.fm, and regional organizations

REACHING DIFFERENT GENRES OF READERS

• Use social media
  • Like or retweet authors on Twitter to find their fans; search their name across platforms to find their fandom, as well as hashtags they might use
  • Tumblr is a good resource for finding diversity within genres
  • Create targeted Facebook events; ask authors you’re hosting in-store to promote these events
• Host genre-based book clubs or advisory boards
• Send out genre-specific newsletters
• Send postcards for an author event to customers who have purchased that author’s books in the past

TAKING ALL GENRES SERIOUSLY

• When talking about selling certain genres, attitudes of co-workers can be a problem. How can we work on that?
• Start a conversation among staff; be clear that making fun of a book is like making fun of a customer, and that genre readers read more than just that genre
• Explain that children are not shamed for reading genre fiction, so adults shouldn’t be either
• One store’s motto: Keep it classy, not sassy.
• Selling a book is selling a book; no matter what the genre, it helps the store financially