The Power of the Recommendation

 

by Alison Janssen

 

Do you realize how much power you have?

 

 

As a reader, you hold the power of recommendation.

 

You can recommend a good book to your friends. To your family. To your online community of followers, facebook friends, fellow readers. To the members of your knitting clubs, or the students in your cooking class, or your roller derby teammates, or the local chapter of Medieval Jousters Anonymous.

 

But did you know you also have the power of recommendation at your local library? You can request an interlibrary loan, or bring a book to the attention of your librarian. Perhaps the next time she places an order, she'll remember your recommendation and add it to the local collection.

 

You have the power of recommendation at your local indie, too. A book I'd been looking forward to for years -- seriously, YEARS -- was released in August. I special ordered it at my favorite walking-distance bookstore, and at the time, it was the only copy they ordered. I gushed about it a lot while they rang me up.

 

The next time I visited the store, there was one copy stocked on the shelf. I bought that one, too, and gushed again. (For my mom.)

 

And yesterday, when I went back to do some Christmas shopping, there were three copies of the book in stock -- and not just on the shelf, but displayed on a holiday gift table. So I bought another one (this time for my dad's girlfriend, who I hope doesn't read this blog!), and talked more about how good the book is. The bookseller ringing me up said she's been meaning to read it, and I hope she does.

 

Now I won't pretend that it was all my fan-girl attention that caused A Room Of One's Own to keep ordering this book (it did get reviewed in something called the New York Times, or whatever), but I do know that talking to your local indie booksellers, telling them the books you've read and loved -- that will have an impact. A bookseller may read something based on your excited recommendation, and then hand sell it to five more people the next week.

 

Word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and it's not trickle-down only. It's groundswell, too.

 

Remember the power you hold, and wield it!

 

 

Comments

[Sarah W]

Yes!

Please do let the librarians know if you can't find something in the library catalog - our *job* is to get it for you. Especially if we missed one of the books in a series!

Thanks for spreading the word, Alison!

[Roy Innes]

I second Sarah W. Did a search and discovered that not a single library in the province had my latest novel listed, although many had the first two in the series. Found a library central email address and contacted them. Got a prompt response, thanking me for the heads-up, and within a week the title appeared in one after another of our provincial libraries from Vancouver to the boondocks.

[michael]

As a former book product supervisor at Tower Records and Books in Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles), I had a role in selecting the books we carried. I spent a great deal of time studying my sales reports looking for what was selling and what had stopped selling.

Every bookstore has different customers. The job of the book buyer is like shopping for a few hundred people you will never meet (and you thought it was hard to pick the right book for your cousin). I knew if one person was interested in a book there was a strong chance there were more out there who would buy that book. I always bring in two copies of any title anyone asked for. I then would watch its sales. Sell out fast and I start looking at books from the same author or books on the same subject.

I always thanked those who asked for books, they let me double the sales of books over the sales compared to any other book buyer ever at that store.

[Dale Spindel]

I wish more people realized that they had the ability to make requests for items to be purchased for their library's collection. I will almost always purchase recently released items that have been requested, sharing Michael's philosophy that there will probably be at least one other person beside the person making the request who will be interested in that item. I am philosophically opposed to placing interlibrary loan requests for anything that was published less than a year ago so I make sure to leave room in the budget to be able to purchase these requests as they come up. For items older than one year, interlibrary loan works just fine.