Let's Brush Up on Historical Fiction-- Another New Feature

I am often asked to provide genre training to librarians-- both on specific genres and on helping genre readers in general. I am always happy to do this for any genre, but the frequency of these requests has been increasing lately and I don't want to limit myself to only helping those who I can reach in person or with webinars.

In the hopes of helping as many people as possible, I am starting another new training feature here on the blog that I am calling, "Let's Brush Up." I will take up genres and even smaller subgenres and focus on the key titles and how to help fans.

My work over the last two years running the ARRT Crime Fiction Genre Study has invigorated me to the benefit of regular genre "brush ups" for all library workers who assist leisure readers, and now that my genre study duties are winding down, I will have time to focus on all the genres.

So I begin today with Historical Fiction.

Recently, Booklist hosted this webinar on Historical Fiction. It includes an overview of the genre and its appeal to readers by Jen Baker, the author of The Readers' Advisory Guide to Historical Fiction [from the same series as my horror book], a broad look at the genre with a focus on key titles by Brad Hooper, author of this book on Historical Fiction and Adult Editor at Booklist, and a representative from FiveStar [publisher].

The webinar as a whole provides a quick overview of the genre and provides some key new titles to keep your eye out for. It is free to anyone with this link.

Back in April, I also prepared a brand new 60 minute webinar on Historical Fiction for the Massachusetts Library System. You can watch the entire webinar here. Slides only are here.

My webinar contains much more general information about helping Historical Fiction readers including a clickable list of resources if you use the slides only link.

Between these 2 webinars you can feel confident that you can help today's historical fiction readers, and goodness knows there are a lot of them, so start brushing up.

On a side note, I am getting enough regular features now that this Fall I will work on a more official schedule and a page where they can all be easily accessed in one place.

If you want a specific genre tackled sooner rather than later or you want me to create another feature that would help you to help your readers better, please let me know.