Skip to main content

Celebrity Book Clubs & Readers' Advisory

Butler, R., Cowan, B., & Nilsson, S. (2005) discuss the effect of Oprah's book club on selected books' performance on the best seller list after being selected. The study took at look at how well books did after Oprah selected books for her book club in the three months following her selection. Butler et al. discovered that all books ended up on the top 150 best seller list for several week after selection.

How do these celebrity book clubs influence readers' advisory?

I remember working in the library when Oprah would select a book. Several people would call the same day wanting to find that particular book. Unfortunately the library's supply was always much lower than the demand. This left readers wanting something that they could not get. Back then I had no idea about readers' advisory. I just shelved books and occasionally pointed out the non-fiction area or the children's books. Today I know that celebrity book clubs have boosted the need readers' advisory at times. When those books are not available we have to find something that is similar to what our patrons are looking for to satiate their reading appetite.

How do we find books for patrons when they really wanted that particular book?

There is something to be said about being well read, but even the most well read librarian cannot know all there is to know about every book that will end up as a celebrity book club selection. For example, I recently read Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton which was an Oprah Book Club pick through the O Magazine. I would not have know about this book or title without reading the magazine. Using tools like magazines such Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Review can help us keep up with upcoming books and help us seem more well read. Tools like NoveList can help when were are in a bind. Overall it is our job to help patrons find what they want or something similar.

Comments

  1. Erin CataldiFebruary 27, 2017 at 9:23 AM

    Full points!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Avery SmithMarch 6, 2017 at 4:40 PM

    Thanks for sharing your personal experiences around what happened at the library whenever Oprah's book club announced a new book. I wasn't working at the library when Oprah's book club was in full swing, so this was informative. I also think you make a great point about educating ourselves, as librarians, with lots of readalikes and a general understanding of the books recommended not only in Oprah's book club, but also in her magazine in general. Good idea!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Urban Fiction Annotation

Tile: The Wife of a Hustler Author: Porscha Sterling 126 pages ISBN: 9781511476461 Synopsis: Vanessa is The Wife of a Hustler  and she is tired of the hustle. Or is she? Vanessa loves her husband Ty and would do anything to keep him, including kill. However, Vanessa is having a hard time trusting Ty with her heart since he has been making more and more frequent trips to see his son and his baby mama Trinity. Trinity would love nothing more than to be Ty's main focus. She would be his main focus if she could just get rid of Vanessa. Trouble finds Trinity just in time for Ty to help out and stay a while. All the trouble causes Vanessa to get into a bit of trouble on her own. Will Vanessa be able to help Ty keep his drug empire? Will she keep her man from being taking by the Trinity the Florida's princess of the drug game? Urban Fiction Appeal: Inner-city life/struggle: The character of Trinity and her brother Loon were abandoned as children and raised themselves in t
4 comments
Read more

Week 14 Prompt: Separating Fiction

Prompt:  Consider yourself part of the collection management committee of your local library, or a library at which you would like to work. You must decide whether or not to separate GBLTQ fiction and African American Fiction from the general collection to its own special place. Some patrons have requested this, yet many staff are uncomfortable with the idea - saying it promotes segregation and disrupts serendipitous discovery of an author who might be different from the reader. Do you separate them? Do you separate one and not the other? Why or why not? You must provide at least 3 reasons for or against your decision. Feel free to use outside sources - this is a weighty question that is answered differently in a lot of different libraries. Response: I like to be on the side of forward thinking. Librarians have a duty to bring certain issues and in this mater types of fiction to the light. Placing GBLTQ and African American Fiction among the general fiction is almost like hiding it i
5 comments
Read more

Week 16 Prompt: Past, Present, and Future of Books

Reading has definitely changed since I was a child. I remember the first book I read by myself was a glow-in-the-dark book! It was so cool to be able to read the book in a closet at school. I was able to literally go in the coat closet and read my book. That was the coolest and newest thing back before everyone had tablets, mobile phones, or even computers in their home. Today all of those technologies that we rely on have a back light and thus glow, so to speak. I remember reading all the time as a child. My mother read a lot more than she watched television and so did I. We took weekly trips to the library and so did other families in our neighborhood.  Today it is more rare to see families engaged in reading that way. However, there are new ways to read books other than going to get a hard copy. One can simply download a file to their mobile device and have the book on the go and several others at the same time without carrying the weight of all of those titles. While reading has
2 comments
Read more