One of the hardest things for those of use who are entrenched in the book world to understand is what books the general public, as a whole, are actually reading and enjoying.
That is not to say that we don't know what is popular. Of course we know what books are on the bestseller list, which titles are filling up our holds queues, and what is showing up on the return carts. But here is something important to remember admit this onslaught of data... none of this information tells us if the readers are enjoying these titles. This is much harder to figure out and requires more, and different, work.
Let me take a step back for a moment and remind you, while we know that people are buying certain titles and/or checking them out in high numbers, we have NO IDEA if any of these readers are enjoying said titles, or quite honestly, even reading them at all. I make this comment in a lot of my presentations and it is often an eye opening reminder to many library workers. It is something we forget that we don't really know.
I have a tag, "Interactive RA," where I call out posts where I write about being more proactive in encouraging patrons to share their experiences with a book. You can check out the tag or go here to my most popular post on the topic for more.
Those posts are about working with your local patrons, but you also need a sense of the larger picture. What are readers all over the country enjoying right now? This information is a great resource for some sure bet suggestions that you might not have thought of yourself.
Over on Book Riot, one of their writers used Goodreads to suss out this information. Entitled, "TOP BOOKS 2021: THE MOST HIGHLY RANKED AND WIDELY READ BOOKS ON GOODREADS THIS YEAR" took a deep dive into the 2021 reader rankings. From the introduction to the piece:
Have you been googling “top books 2021” lately? So have lots of people! Obviously there are lots of ways you could go about looking into this, but I’ve gone to Goodreads to investigate. Focusing on books published in 2021, I’ve looked at the top ranked books. Goodreads, as you might know, allows you to rate books by whole stars out of five (no half stars!) and then provides an average rating out of five. For the purposes of narrowing down the choices for this top books 2021 list, I decided the cut-off for high rankings would be an average of 4.25 out of five. If we’re really talking about the top ranked books, I thought, the average rating should be at least that high.
The other issue I took into consideration was how many Goodreads users had ranked the books. I found some very highly ranked 2021 books, but under 10,000 people had read and ranked them. This to me felt like it was easier statistically for these books to be highly rated. Also, if a relatively small number of people are reading a certain book, is it really a top book of 2021? I decided no. You might disagree, which is fine!
So here’s my list of the top books of 2021. They all have an average rating of 4.25 out of five stars or higher and have been ranked by 10,000 people or more. A few books that could have otherwise made the list were cut (the lowest ranked ones) since there was already ample representation of their genre. Speaking of genres/forms, the ones that made it onto the list are: literary fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, romance, nonfiction, and young adult. Onto the list!
Of course, this is not a perfect list as it only considers Goodreads, but it is a great resource for suggestions of proven, new titles, information we have trouble collecting in real time.
Scan the list and make sure, at the very least, you own all of these titles. And then make a display of any that are on your shelf right now. And include the full list on all of your digital platforms and social media. Book Riot has given you the eye catching title already.
But then also, take it a step further, and ask you patrons to leave their top titles of 2021-- either on a slip of paper near a physically display or in the comments online. Then you can crowdsource your library's more local version of this list. And if you have a staff Goodreads page [which I have encouraged numerous times] you can also promote it by posting this list.
For more posts about Interactive RA click here.
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