Link Du Jour: This Is How You Sell Books
As a school librarian, I’m always trying to generate interest in books. Most often, I use one of the following approaches:
1. I slap a “Mr. Jonker Recommends” sign on a book I like. It looks like this:
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Or…
2. I display new or relevant books face out in different areas of the library.
But these two methods seem downright sneaky when compared with the beautiful obviousness of a recent McNally Jackson bookstore technique:
Look for my display “Here Are Some Books with Horses on their Covers” – coming at you for the 2010-11 school year.
(Thanks to BuzzFeed for the link)
Filed under: Link Du Jour
About Travis Jonker
Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.
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Don’t we all judge a book by it’s cover?
I love the quote from Maryrose Wood’s book, The Mysterious Howling,
“All books are judged by their covers until they are read.”
That is hilarious!
Can I just say that I love this idea? Simple, effective, inspired. Kudos, TJ!
First off, I can’t tell you how valuable this blog is to me as a fairly-new-to-school-libraries person. Great reviews, great sense of humour, awesome stuff. So I hope you don’t mind that I have totally taken your “recommends” signs and made my own, along with some blanks that my good readers like to write their own names on to show off their favourite books. Thank you so much!
Thanks for the kind words. By all means you can use the Recommends idea – cool to hear! Actually, I might have to take your idea for having teachers fill in their names – I like that a lot.
I may have to “borrow” some of these ideas!! There are always those books that sell themselves and others that you almost beg readers to checkout.