One of my favorite things about Book Riot is that their entire reason for existing is to encourage readers to click on their stories. This means that they are constantly producing content that readers actually want and need. They are able to address trends and produce annotated lists of titles that people would love if only they knew about them, very quickly.
For those of us who work at the library and are struggling to keep up with the day to day tasks, these lists are RA gold. We know we can use them to make displays and provide online content for our readers in real time. We can also use them to check our collections and add titles that, while not hugely popular yet, will address an emerging trend. Titles we can position on displays and lists ASAP. Titles people would love, if only they knew they existed.
Book Riot also has intentional diversity editorial standards, so that you can trust that they will never put out a list that is all white and hetero.
One example of these helpful lists is when they identify micro-genre trends. Yesterday they had one of these articles entitles "What is LitRPG?" From the article:
LitRPG has been pretty huge for a while now. If you’re not a regular of science fiction and fantasy, however, you may not be familiar with the term nor some of its biggest successes. Fortunately for you, I’m here with a primer on all things about literary roleplaying games, also known as LitRPGs.
Click here to read the primer and see a list of example books-- and not the ones you know about like Ready Player One or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. These are the types of books I advocate featuring-- the ones people wouldn't know about without your help.
Book Riot does these kinds of posts all the time. Let them stay on top of all the trends for you, from emerging micro-genres to readalikes for popular media to newsletters on a whole bunch of topics. Let them do the work for us. They want to do it. They get paid to do it. We need to be providing this information to our readers and we really don't have the time to be as up to date as our readers need us to.
Remember, our main job is to provide information to our patrons. We don't have to create said information. We don't get a prize for doing everything on our own. Quite the opposite. We succeed when we use resources to help our readers find the best books for them. RESOURCES. Our brains are not the only, and definitely not the best, resource. If we only rely on ourselves we are not only failing our readers, we are also not being good information professionals.
So check out this post on LitRPG and pay attention to Book Riot for your displays, online lists, and collection development needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment