Keeping Up With the "Hot" Summer Books

As we all know, Memorial Day Weekend is the unofficial start of summer, so today, I welcome summer.

One of the biggest marketing gimmicks in the book world is "the summer read." I have talk about it in year's past on this blog here.

Whether it is a gimmick or not, the real truth is that people tend to have more time to read in the summer and they come into our libraries in droves asking for the "hot books." First, we have to make sure we have them ordered and second, we need to make sure we have readalikes ready to deal with the long wait lists.

Let's start on the "first" in that statement. How do you stay up on all of the buzz about summer books? Luckily I have an easy answer, Early Word's Summer 2010 archive. This is the place to go for all of the media and publisher lists of the best summer books. Do not fret any longer; stop keeping your own archive; Nora and her crew will keep you on top of it all.

Now on to the "second." You have ordered all the hot summer books, but due to the marketing gimmick of summer reading, they are all checked out. Not to fear, over the course of the summer, I will be providing some suggestions for readalikes to some of the hottest books of summer, but in the meantime, the wonderful women over at Shelf Renewal are always providing backlist suggestions for all of the most popular books, all year long. Click here for a recent example.

On an important side note, Shelf Renewal will be moving to a new Word Press based  format sometime next week. I will post the details and update my links as soon as it moves.

For the record you can access both Early Word and Shelf Renewal on the right gutter of RA for All in any season.