The Hot Sheet—an industry newsletter for authors—covered Virtual BookExpo 2020’s day of library programming, including our session, How Public Library Events Drive Discovery & Sales. With their permission, we’re sharing an excerpt of the article about our session below, and you can read their full coverage in the June 10, 2020 issue.
You can also watch the full recording on BEA’s Facebook page which includes the session before ours on Readers’ Advisory, which The Hot Sheet also covered.
Libraries Managing through Lockdown—and Beyond
The final panel we attended focused on how library events drive discovery and sales. This was the only session not concerned solely with managing the current crisis, but it dovetailed nicely with the readers’ advisory session, given the concern that librarians will have to be more creative with recommendation lists and events. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez of the Panorama Project led the discussion with a look at Panorama’s most recent research into library events and book sales.
Ninety percent of libraries sell books at their events, often through a partnership with a local bookstore. A bookstore will not only have the books in stock at their store, but will sell books at the back of the room at the event. Gonzalez said that because those libraries aren’t working directly with publishers to order books (and often work outside of the main promotional windows), publishers are often unaware of library events’ commercial impact on sales, as full credit goes not to the library but the bookstore or organization that’s doing the selling. Further exacerbating the issue: authors may not even tell their publisher about such events, nearly eliminating the chance a publisher would connect a sales spike with library marketing and promotion. Libraries themselves don’t always capture event information; if they do, it’s unlikely they’ll take steps to share that information with publishers. Gonzalez said Panorama will be building a marketing evaluation toolkit to help libraries report back to publishers in a framework that they understand and put a value on their efforts.
Michael Goldsmith, a publicist from the Big Five publisher Doubleday, says that when he’s considering what venues to focus on for author appearances, he’s less focused on the category of venue than what it can do to reach its community. “A library is as attractive a venue as any other place an author might appear on a book tour,” he said, assuming they can reach their readers and local community. However, he does look for a library that has an independent bookstore as a co-promoter (one that reports to The New York Times), to help get the word out and sell books, especially for high-attendance events. He added later that there’s no such thing as an event or library that’s too small. “There is always the right size event to match the right opportunity. Even tens or dozens of attendees is [more] meaningful, or can be, than no event at all.”
In the pivot to virtual events, all the same considerations apply: finding good partnerships, doing robust marketing to produce turnout, getting email addresses of attendees, and reporting back the results to authors and publishers. In a library survey run by Panorama and Library Journal, 70 percent of libraries have put an author visit or book-event programming online, and another 17 percent were planning to do so.
For more information on the Public Library Events & Book Sales Survey, check out our full report.