Resource Alert: The Millions' Second Half of 2019 Book Preview

Click here to accessthe full annotated list

Just as I brought you the Second Half of 2019 Horror Preview last week, The Millions is here with their much larger and broader in scope The Great Second-Half 2019 Preview

Now, many of you are thinking right now-- Becky what have you just done to my personal TBR pile? All of these titles are going to make my head explode. I will never get to them all.

But that is not why I am passing the list on. Promise. [And just in case you don't believe me, here is a post I did in 2017 About how to manage your TBR anxiety.]

The Millions puts out these 6 month, usefully annotated with appeal and readalike information, lists twice a year and they are a treasure trove of information for us-- both the current list and the previous lists too.

First the current list [which you can access here]. Of course this is a wonderful resource for those of you who do collection development. Make sure you have these titles ordered, yes, but also find ways to make this list available to your patrons so they know now, in the summer when we are busiest and when many adults are rediscovering their love of reading, what books to be excited about in the coming months.

Put links to this list on your social media, websites, catalogs [if you can], and also in your buildings as a print out. When you are making these lists available to patrons make sure you are clear that these are books you can get for people. Use the excitement of greatly anticipated titles to spur interest and holds in these books and others while they wait.

Look, we think it is obvious that if we link to a list of upcoming books that our patrons understand that means we will have them. Well it is not. Trust me. I still encounter people that don't know they can place a hold on a title before it is released. We are used to our processes because we live and breathe them every day. Our patrons are not us. Please be explicit when posting lists of upcoming books, especially such well produced ones like this list. The annotation are extremely useful here. Make it clear that we want to help get the titles that interest each patron into their hands.

Second, speaking of the annotations, both in the current list and the previous lists, these annotations are ready made book talks. Seriously, you don't have to do anything more than read the annotation to a patron to hand sell the title. Again, you do not have to have read these books to suggest them. [See I promised you I am not trying to sabotage your teetering TBR.]

Take the first book in the list, a title I know every library will purchase, as an example:

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead: Fresh off a Pulitzer for The Underground Railroad, Whitehead returns to the subject of America’s racist history with this tale of a college-bound black man who runs afoul of the law in Jim Crow Florida and ends up in the hellish Nickel Academy, where boys are beaten and sexually abused by the staff. In an early review, Publishers Weekly calls The Nickel Boys “a stunning novel of impeccable language and startling insight.” (Michael)

Every single one of you, whether you will read this book or not, will have someone ask you about it and/or you will have the opportunity to talk it up to a potential reader at some point, I mean the author was on the cover of Time for goodness sake. You have everything you need to help that patron, right here on the screen. Now multiple that a lot of times [I didn't count every title, sorry] for this list and then multiply it again for every backlist [because they do this 2x a year, every year], and you have a never ending book suggestion engine with your talking points all set out for you.

And third [not that you need a third], a point to which I have already alluded to, the backlist of all of their "Book Preview" pieces are where you should be going to book talk those titles you already have on the shelf right now. If they were hotly anticipated a year ago, there is a good chance that they are a great read right now, and one your patron doesn't have to wait for.

And hey, spoiler, I looked and yep, I was right. That list from the beginning of 2018 has some amazing titles you can confidently hand out right now. And remember, you don't have to have read them yourself because of that awesome annotations that you can use as your book talk.