This is Not a Drill: WHY I LOVE HORROR Is Available for Download on Edelweiss

 

A little mid-week self promotion today.

The DRC of my upcoming book is available here for you to download. It's not on Net Galley yet, but I am sure it will be soon.

Stop what you are doing and download it AFTER you pre-order for your library.

If you already use Edelweiss to vote for LibraryReads you should be good to go. Speaking of, did you know you can vote now for ANY month of LibraryReads? You can. It is the same process on any book no matter when it is supposed to come out. I have already voted for books coming out in the late summer and Fall (including my book). I mean if writers a varied as Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Daniel Kraus, Mallory O'Mearea, and Eric LaRocca think it is great, I am sure your patrons will too. Click here for those blurbs.

Did I mention the TOC? I have. Well here it is again because these are the authors you patrons already love and many of them are in the LibraryReads Hall of Fame:

• Introduction by Sadie Hartmann
• Why Ask Why by Becky Spratford
• Brian Keene’s Giant-Size Man-Thing by Brian Keene
• The Giant Footprint of Horror by Hailey Piper
• In the Bermuda Triangle with Sasquatch, Flesh Smoldering by John Langan
• What You Can Learn from Horror: Don’t run from darkness; it’s trying to teach you a lesson by Alma Katsu
• Horror is Life: A Blood-soaked Love Letter by Gabino Iglesias
• My Long Road to Horror by Tananarive Due
• Monster Girl: How Horror Gave Me a Place to Belong by Jennifer McMahon
• On the Amtrak, Heading Home by Josh Malerman
• Why Horror? by Paul Tremblay (drawings by Emma Tremblay)
• Why I Love Horror by Grady Hendrix
• My Mother Was Margaret White by Cynthia Pelayo
• Why I Am Horror by Clay McLeod Chapman
• A Day in My Psychedelic World by Nuzo Onoh
• Permission to Scream by Rachel Harrison
• Horror Saved My Life by Victor LaValle
• Tales From My Crypt by Mary SanGiovanni
• Of Men and Monsters by David Demchuk
• Why Horror by Stephen Graham Jones

Please contact me if you have questions or you work at a library or bookstore and do not yet have access to the book via this link.

The Trouble with BISAC Codes

Today I am going to talk about BISAC Codes. What are they? Great question. The easiest answer for you the library worker is that they are like our subject headings but for book publishers and bookstores. Here is the official definition:

The BISAC Subject Codes List* (or BISAC Subject Headings) is the US standard topical categorization used by companies throughout the supply chain. The Subject Heading applied to a book can determine where the work is shelved in a brick and mortar store or the genre(s) under which it can be searched for in an internal database.

Here is the official list of BISAC Codes.

All of us interact with these codes in NetGalley or Edelweiss and in our ordering platforms. Here is an example for the upcoming book Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin via Edelweiss:

Black Flame  

Gretchen Felker-Martin

FRONTLIST | On Sale Date: August 5, 2025

9781250348012, 1250348013

Trade Paperback

$18.99 USD, $25.99 CAD

• Fiction / Horror 
• Fiction / LGBTQ+ / Transgender
• Fiction / Performing Arts / Film, Television & Radio

I bolded the BISAC Codes for you. But now you can see how they are similar to subject headings.

I picked this book for many reasons, but most notably because of the middle BISAC Code. Let me back up a little more though.

BISAC Codes are applied by the publishers for the reasons listed above in the definition but to reiterate, it is for shelving and searching. In this case Black Flame (I have already read it for review in Booklist) is 100% Horror. And it is also a cursed film book and the story of a deeply closeted Lesbian. Now the Transgender tag is mostly added because Felker-Martin herself is transgender. FYI (There is a storyline that includes a transgender character.)

Now, in this case, the code is applied to a pro-transgender book, but what about when it is applied to a title like Irreversible Damage. Well much like I talk about sour library's subject headings having the potential to cause harm (please click here for a much larger post on who we NEED to reckon with that and FIX it), Publishers Weekly ran a story about how BISAC Codes can hurt more than they help booksellers here. From that article:

For instance, when customers search for “feminist, queer, or trans” titles on the Charis website—a part of the American Booksellers Association’s IndieCommerce platform, which is fueled by Ingram—homophobic or transphobic titles often pop up. “People find books Charis would never carry,” Look said, “and we have to manually take them off our website.”

Look recalled an instance when Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters topped the results on searches for books on transgender studies. “Other transphobic books would also pop up,” she said. “They need to add to the category of transgender studies, ‘criticism of transgender,’ so it doesn’t all come up together.”

This statement is very similar to what I say in the Actively Anti-Racist Service to Leisure Readers program that Robin and I offer. And again, it also mimics what I say about this same title in that presentation.

Another problem I have with BISAC Codes is that it labels the books as for someone and not for others. In that article there is a great example from a bookseller:

“BISAC misses connections between books that we booksellers make,” Smith said. “For us, it’s all about connecting the reader with the right book. We shelve books to guide customers between categories, not separate books.” If there is a question about best store placement, she said, she is more likely to ask the publishers’ rep for recommendations.

Another concern, Smith said, is that drilling down into hyper-specific categories can pigeonhole some books and authors, in, for example, such a category as fiction/Indigenous/Indigenous futurism. “Great Indigenous writers are great writers who happen to be Indigenous,” she said. “You risk ghettoizing certain subcategories if you follow BISAC too closely.” While books by authors like Tommy Orange and Louise Erdrich are not categorized as Indigenous literature, books by lesser-known authors—such as the nonfiction and poetry works of Linda LeGarde Grover, for instance—sometimes are.

This is also something I talk at length about in my program with Robin-- how we need to use the book's appeal NOT the author's identity to match books with readers.

In the article a bookseller also acknowledges that BIASC Codes help librarians as we are making purchasing decisions. And here is a mother problem I have. Again, let's use Black Flame as our example but this time for it's for the Horror BISAC Code. 

Horror is listed first-- loudly and proudly. As it should be by the way, both because it is first and foremost a Horror story in the cursed film subgenre, and it is being published by Tor Nightfire, a Horror specific imprint. But until recently, Horror was a "bad word" in publishing and not proudly attached as a BISAC Code to many books. As someone whose job it is to write an annual preview article of the genre in the July issue of Library Journal each year, for many years, it was very difficult for me to find all the Horror titles that were clearly Horror but instead got a BISAC Code for supernatural thriller or Gothic or Ghost.

However, now we see the overuse of Horror for titles that may not be for Horror fans, because it is popular. Same thing for Romance. And we have genres that are on the outs that are getting left off. The Publihsers want to sell the most number of books. This we know

I am not proposing a solution here today, but rather, I have this post to remind you that the issues we have with Subject Headings and what booksellers are seeing with BISAC Codes are not that different. Read the article as it is tangentially to your work. I am glad these larger issues are being discussed outside of our library circles. They are important conversations that may not have an easy (or any) solution, but talking about them publicly helps us all work to do better.

Collection Development Crash Courses via ALA

Look, I know with the confusion around IMLS funding that a lot of Continuing Education is on hold in most library budgets and especially in State Library budgets (which is how most libraries get their CE) . That is why I want to point you to this ALA Courses option this July as you can get four classes for staff across all of your service areas for less than hiring me to make a virtual visit to your library.

And all four of these people are excellent. I not only know and trust them, I helped to bring them to eCourses for these classes. And, they have done this previously. The reactions were so positive, they are back.

Click here for all of details or use the links below. Please note, you can buy only the classes you want, but honestly, it is a much better deal to get them all and just make sure the correct people at your library watch the one for them.

Webinars and eCourses for Library Professionals Collection Development Crash Course A bundle of four 90-minute webinars.

Wednesdays, July 2, 9, 16, and 23, 2025 2:30 pm Eastern | 1:30 pm Central | 12:30 pm Mountain | 11:30 am Pacific

If you’re new to collection development, it can be intimidating. Responsibility for a library collection has many facets, from assessing the needs of your community to staying current. We’ve assembled a team of four collection development experts for this crash course webinar series, and they’ll take you through everything you need to get started.   This four-part event includes the following sessions (all sessions also available for individual purchase): Developing the Youth Collection with Julie Jurgens: Wednesday, July 2, 2025 Developing the Adult Fiction Collection with Lila Denning: Wednesday, July 9, 2025 Developing the Adult Nonfiction Collection with Stephanie Sendaula: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 Weeding Your Collection with Karen Toonen: Wednesday, July 23, 2025 Each session also available for separate registration Developing the Youth Collection In this webinar, you’ll learn the basics of collection development for kids and teens. You'll also learn about how to prepare for and handle material challenges and how to make sure your collection development policy provides adequate support for these situations. Developing the Adult Fiction Collection Diversity is the key to a strong adult fiction collection. In this webinar, collection development expert Lila Denning will cover how you can grow and diversify your collection to make better readers advisory choices and offer stronger materials to your patrons. Developing the Adult Nonfiction Collection In this event, collection development expert Stephanie Sendaula will show you best practices for developing, maintaining, and weeding the adult nonfiction collection, with an emphasis on staying up to date with trends in popular areas such as memoirs and cookbooks. Weeding Your Collection A truly patron-driven collection serves its community effectively, and with continually increasing demands taxing libraries’ limited resources, every item in a physical collection must justify its shelf space. In this webinar, weeding expert Karen Toonen will cover the challenges inherent to weeding and share tips, tricks, and tools for collection evaluation.

After participating in this event, you will:

• Have a stronger understanding of how to get started with nonfiction collection development
• Be equipped to stay up to date with nonfiction trends that can help you to keep a collection current
• Gain the confidence to purchase books in subjects outside of your usual reading interests
• Understand the foundational reasons for diversifying your collection and be able to reliably discover diverse materials
• Understand strategies for recommending works either actively or passively that go beyond your lived experience or the perceived lived experience of your community
• Recognize the importance of the book atmosphere and how libraries, publishers, reviewers, vendors, authors, bookstores and the public all work together
• Understand the fundamentals of curating and maintaining collections for youth and teens
• Have a list of resources to consult, including where to find reviews and other collection support tools.
• Feel empowered to advocate for materials for youth and teens
• Be able to articulate to internal and external stakeholders why weeding is as important as selection as part of a robust collection development plan
• Be able to revitalize collections, increase circulation, enhance visibility of diverse materials, and highlight materials relevant to your communities with confidence
• Be able to implement logical, rigorous weeding doctrines which will free areas for new collections, promote patron driven collection policies, and create additional space.

Click here to learn more and register.

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day. Please share this information with your patrons. Supporting you local book store yourself and encourage your patrons to make a visit too.

But today I also want to make a plea for your library to be a customer as well. I know that we mostly buy our books from Baker & Taylor or Ingram, but it is important to support our local bookstores as well. A vibrant literary community has libraries and bookstores. 

When I was in collections and ran a book club, we worked with a local book store to buy 10 paperback copies of all 12 of our book discussion titles each year. We got a good deal (almost as good as Ingram) and we had the store put a sticker in the book so they could advertise themself and note their cooperation with the library. Those titles were used for our book clubs and then entered into our book discussion collection. They were a community collection in the truest sense-- bought form na local store and then shared throughout the community for local book clubs.

We also used the local independent book store to purchase prizes for summer reading. Totebags, book marks, pins, notebooks, socks, t-shirts, etc.... all that great stuff that these stores sell alongside the books. This also supported the store and gave us the prizes we needed.

Below, I am sharing the text from an email I received from my publisher, Saga Press, as to how we authors could help support our independent bookstores. I edited it a bit to be more directed at you-- the library worker-- but there are some great tips here.

And for my Chicago area friends, my favorite independent book stores are Exile in Bookville, City Lit, and Bucket 'O Blood Books and Records.

See the shared link below to use the map or visit the Independent Bookstore Day landing page for the most unto date information. 

One Day. Fifty States. 1,600+ Bookstores.

Sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, Independent Bookstore Day is a national celebration that takes place on the last Saturday of April each year. The day highlights the value of independent bookstores and the unique ways they contribute to their communities. It’s a celebration of books, readers, and indie bookselling.  

On IBD, indie bookstores often plan activities, host events, serve refreshments, and have special programming like scavenger hunts and bookstore crawls, raffles,  games, and more. And they ride a wave of positive publicity and social media buzz around indie bookstores.  

 

The ABA creates IBD-specific merchandise and swag for stores. None of these items are available anywhere except at ABA member indie bookstores. 

 

Here is a list of ways you can support Independent Bookstores on April 26 and beyond. Independent Bookstores champion authors and books, provide essential community spaces for readers, and collectively host thousands of authors each year for book launches, talks, and panels. 

 

1. Shop! Consider visiting your local indie and making some purchases. It's a great day to do some gift-buying. Mother's Day, graduation season, and Father's Day are all right around the corner, after all. 

 

2. Social shout-out: While you’re in the store, take a selfie (or shelfie) and/or a photo of your purchases to share on social media, tagging the bookstore and encouraging folks to buy at the indies. 

 

3. Participate in a Bookstore Crawl: Why visit one bookstore when you could visit several? Many stores in urban areas organize crawls, with punch cards for participants and prizes if you visit every store on a list.(Link to the Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl for NYC authors) Check with your local indie to see if they're organizing a crawl or look at the ABA bookstore finder map or the indie-to-indie directory and choose your own adventure! 

Share the Independent Bookstore Day homepage with your patrons and encourage them to visit your local independent bookstore.

Be a Gate Opener: Using the The Library of Congress' National Book Festival Highlights Videos To Fight for More Patron Friendly Cataloging

The Library of Congress has been holding the National Book Festival for 25 years and they are celebrating with resources for you. Well to be fair, they always have resources for free because there are our National Book Festival and like our National Museums in DC, it is free.

This year's event is coming in September and on the LOC Blog, they started their promotion by releasing videos from EVERY YEAR in the past.

Here is the intro from that post:

The Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 25th year on September 6, 2025. For this year’s festival information, visit the 2025 National Book Festival website.

To honor the occasion, we are taking the 24 weeks leading up to this year’s festival at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to highlight two videos each week from past National Book Festivals, from the festival’s first year in 2001 to 2024. Each week, we’ll highlight a past festival year with a video from an adult writer and one from a children’s writer. We hope you enjoy scrolling through the past with us! Check out videos from the first 2001 festival here.

The videos they are sharing in this post are from George RR Martin and Meg Cabot.

We are always looking for author content to share with our patrons. Ways for them to connect with their favorites. Well, this is a great easy and FREE way to do that. Add these videos to your websites and socials. But today I want to focus on an even better spot to link these videos of conversations with some of our most popular authors-- YOUR CATALOG.

We do not leverage the power of the link in our catalogs. I know there is resistance in some larger systems, but this resistance has NO MERIT. Yes, even when the department in charge gives you a very good reason, I am telling you--- THEY ARE WRONG.

The number of times I have been told by those above me, especially in tech services, that something I want to do that helps my readers, that puts them first, well, it's a lot. I have said more times that one on this blog and to people in person-- the library rules you claim are intractable are not. They are arbitrary rules that we have made about how books are organized. They are not a law and changing them-- even in large shared systems -- will not take the entire library cataloging system down. And most importantly, there is no library jail. 

Many of our rules also work against our readers and their library experience. Many of our rules are actually meant to keep books on the shelf rather than get them into the hand of our readers. And the fact that people get so mad when you demand they allow you to add things that engage readers and connect them to your collections to your catalog, shows their true colors. They would rather everything be neatly organized on the shelf than in the hands of a reader.

Let's take an example from the real world. I started talking about shelving books in series order NOT alpha order back in 2018. As I argued then, no one reads a series in alpha order, so why do we insist on shelving them that way. (I know why but again, it is a dumb librarian preference and is the opposite of getting books into readers hands more easily).

At the time, very few libraries did this and MANY people told me to be quiet and stop instigating, that it could not be done. Well, guess what? It could. And these days MANY libraries shelve their books in series order. What did it take? It was not some huge software upgrade. It was simply those of us serving readers working with our catalogers to improve discovery and come up with a solution.

Never take NO for an answer when your goal is to put the reader and their experiences first.

So, the people who tell you that you cannot add local information to your OPACs are also wrong. I have talked to people at a few large consortia and while they agreed that the first instinct is to say no, they are 100% ways to add reader focused info like links to author interviews or to locally made readalike lists and more.

Ask why they are saying no. Is it because you will ruin the record or make it messy? That reason is not valid. Fields can be created in all OPACs for links to be added. Is it because they don't want to go back and worry about fixing dead links? Again, not valid. Records need to one edited all of the time. Arguing to not use the technological advantages of an OPAC to engage with your readers because some time in the future the link will be bad is not valid. Here is your counter-- that is like saying we should not add any new books because one day they will be weeded.

Yes it is that simple. 

I am using this post today as the start of a new series I am calling "Be a Gate Opener." I will have a longer post describing what I mean by the term "Gate Opener" soon, but today I am beginning the conversation with you so that you can start the conversation at your library. The ultimate goal is to create a new program on this topic as well. But baby steps. Start with these excellent, free videos that we, as citizens of this country, own so they can be shared without copyright worries.

Click here for more information any time of the year via the homepage for the National Book Festival. But use this as a great chance to fight for adding more discovery power to your OPAC.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Hugo and Nebula Awards Editions

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.  

Both of the major Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards announced their finalists in the last month or so. I know that many library workers confuse them and even blend them when promoting to readers, which for most of our purposes is fine. Simply knowing that these are award nominated titles in SF and FSY is enough to suggest them to readers.

Plus-- two similar awards means double the suggestions for us to supply confidently. I am posting them together to double the impact of each.

But there are differences, even when titles overlap. Today I will have the links to both and their backlist direct access as well. But before I get to that, remember to check the link at the top for the first post in this series and use these for displays, collection development, lists and more.

First up, the Nebula Awards are given out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Their process is very similar to the Bram Stoker Awards as they are voted on by the active and lifetime members. From the 2025 announcement back in March:

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 60th Annual Nebula Awards®! Our congratulations go out to each and every finalist for the recognition of their excellent works published in 2024. 

Here are the Novel nominees:

Nebula Award for Novel

• Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, Yaroslav Barsukov (Caezik SF & Fantasy)
• Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)
• Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom)
• A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
• The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK)
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK)

You can click here to see all of the nominees in 7 categories. 

SFWA offers two easy ways to search the backlist. Click here to search by year. Or, click here to search by award and add a year if you want to the search.

Second we have the Hugo Award Finalists. The Hugo Awards are based on those attending Worldcon each year. Here is the announcement for 2025; I have copied the intro so you understand the process on this one.

Seattle Worldcon 2025, the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

1,338* valid electronic nominating ballots were received by the deadline of March 14 at 11:59 p.m. PDT and counted from the members of the 2024 and 2025 World Science Fiction Conventions for the 2025 Hugo Awards. ​​Unfortunately, two mailed ballots were received 2.5 weeks later on April 3 after the deadline of receipt. Voting on the final ballot will open during April 2025.

Only Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS members will be able to vote on the final ballot and choose the winners for the 2025 Awards. The 2025 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award will be presented on Saturday evening, August 16, 2025, at a formal ceremony at Seattle Worldcon 2025.

Questions about the Hugo Awards process may be directed to hugo-help@seattlein2025.org.

* Initial publication had an error of 1,738 ballots instead of the correct number of 1,338.

Because the Hugo process is more amorphous and the voting pool changes year to year,  

Best Novel

• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit US, Tor UK)
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, Sceptre)
• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom)
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW)
• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Tor)
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, Hodderscape UK)

1078 ballots cast for 554 nominees, finalists range 90 to 157

You can click here to see all of the nominees in 21(!) categories, including a slew of categories for "fan" created works. 

Now the backlist access to the Hugos is less intuitive precisely because it ties to each year's convention, which is always at a different site. However, Locus Magazine has an excellent dataset of all speculative awards which they make searchable in numerous ways. Here is their page for the Hugos awards. Click here for access to the entire Locus Magazine Awards Database.

Interestingly, despite the widely different processes for niminating titles, two novels made both lists: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW) and A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Tor). There is also overlap in other categories. You can use the links provided to see them all.

It is very common for there to be overlap. I like to look at these titles, where the fans and the writers agree, as the best place to begin with your suggestions to the average reader looking for something good and new in SF or FSY. Pay special attention to those works and make sure you have them ordered.

I would recommend that every library in America have, at the very least, each of the current slate of nominated novels for their collections. You should do this every year. It is the easiest way to make sure you have a vibrant and responsive collection in SF and FSY. 

And finally, award nomination time is also a great time to get up some displays featuring your Science Fiction and Fantasy. One of my favorite display ideas to put both together is to title is something fun like "Aliens vs Dragons" or "Robots vs Fairies." Something that makes it clear that they are different genres but also together.

Make sure you represent the breadth of each genre as well-- both in the subgenres covered and the identities of the authors who are witting them. And encourage all departments to put up a similar display. So in Youth, Teen, and Media. Use the same title throughout the library. Every department has titles to fill a display with SF and FSY. Show your patrons that you are one library, working together to highlight similar materials across your entire collection. Also when something is repeated, people pay more attention.

Now take your service up a notch and make the whole library experience interactive as well but getting your patrons involved in fun. Put up a voting box at each display, on every service desk, and encourage voting via comments in all of your online spaces (post pics of the displays with links to titles on Libby or to a list created in your catalog). Ask people to vote for SF or FSY. Even use the title of your display on a small paper ballot. You can use language like:

Join us at Smithville Public Library as we celebrate our Science Fiction and Fantasy offerings across all departments. Vote for the genre you prefer. Let your voice be heard:

    □ Aliens 

    □ Dragons

Have fun with it.  

And always remember-- awards lists are a great tool for you to use to not only help your readers, but also to create fun interactive displays and increase awareness on titles that are great but often get lost in the stacks and/or amidst the noise of whatever is shiny and new.

The Millions Most Anticipated Lists As a Backlist Resource

Last week, The Million released one of the popular Most Anticipated Lists; this one-- The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview. 

This list obviously helps you to prepare for the coming months. Those of you who do collection development will want to use this list to double check that you already have these books on order and get your orders in for those you missed (although, most of you work way more than 3 months in advance, so you are probably only going to find a few titles here that you think would be good for your library that you might have missed.)

Those who work at the services desk need this information to get ready with their "while you wait" readalike suggestions for many of of the high demand titles and to get ready to promote some promising new voices.

But this post is not only about reminding you to be aware of upcoming books, it is also here to remind you that these "anticipated" lists make an even better recourse after the fact. Let me explain.

Use this link to see all of The Millions' "most anticipated" coverage. And there are a lot because The Millions is always doing lists of upcoming titles to be excited about. Vetted by their editors and contributors, these lists feature fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels, books in translation, literally everything of note that adult services library worker who are helping leisure readers should be aware of. These lists are diverse and inclusive as well. But, most importantly, they are also annotated! This means for every title you have a talking point about it to share with a patron. You don't need to know anything other than how to access these lists; then you read the annotation written by an expert, and viola, you have a booktalk for that title, as well as a way to start a conversation about upcoming books.

[Remember you can and should use the words of others to book talk a book.]

Not only are the titles all annotated, you can pull up every "most anticipated" list in reverse chronological order with this link.

Why use the backlist? I mean if you read this blog you should know, but it always bears repeating, especially when lists like this come out-- bright, shiny, new-- and distract us from our day-to-day work on the ground with readers.

The anticipated lists are there to catch readers' attention. To remind them that there are good reads out there, just over the horizon. To get them excited about their next good read. A sizable number of those who encounter these lists will go into their local library or bookstore to look for these titles, and of course, they are not there yet.

The people who make these lists know that. They know that they are creating a situation where people's interest will be piqued but they will need to place a hold or a pre-order. It's in the title-- "anticipated." 

The Millions is doing the marketing for us. A flashing billboard reading-- HERE COME SOME GREAT READS! Yeah we don't have the books yet, but we have THE BOOKS. We have thousands of them. And many of them were anticipated once upon a time. 

And guess what? If  your reader hadn't read them yet, they are still anticipated. We cannot lose sight of that. We need to use the free marketing from The Millions to our advantage and take a hold but then steer 

those readers to any of their "most anticipated" lists, especially those from 2-5 years ago, while they wait. 

Here are the reasons as to why the full database of ALL of The Millions Most Anticipated coverage is one of your best year round resources:

1. The titles were vetted by experts meaning they are worth your attention at any time, not only when they are new or upcoming. Appearing on this lists is equivalent to a review-- for those of you who cannot order a book without a review. But also, think of the thousands of books that come out every season. If a title makes it to this list, there is a very good chance someone at your library wants to read it.
2. There is a good chance if they were on lists like this that you ordered them for your collections so you own them and probably have not weeded them yet. Looking back 2-5 years means they are probably still relevant as well. 
3. The book talk for you to handsell the title-- verbally or on a list [on the Internet, Libby, or in the library building]-- is right there for you on that list. No work beyond knowing where to click to pull up these lists, look for a good title and read the annotation.
4. Any book on any of the most anticipated lists is a great suggestion anytime people are looking for a good read any time of year. Try the 2024 Spring list first. Why, you can easily start the conversation with your patron saying-- well you want a good read and you aren't sure exactly what type of book, let's look at what everyone was MOST excited about a year ago at this time. These are out and I can help you find the one that will work best for you. (It is the same advice I give all about using LibraryReads as a resource in the intro to every month's posts-- go to the same month's list but from the year before). 
5. And finally, the most important point, when you suggest titles to your patrons that they could not have found on their own, that's when you shine. Reminding people of the treasures that are in the stacks is fun and useful. We need to show them that we are here to help with their leisure reading needs so that they continue to value and seek out our services. When we recommend great titles they may have missed, our users understand the breadth of our collections  and the care with which we have built them, which is something we are not great at communicating to the public.

So yes, go look at the bright and shiny list for Spring 2025 from The Millions, but also make sure you are also using the backlist of  "most anticipated" content to help readers all the time.