Booksellers at the American Booksellers Association’s recent Winter Institute discussed marketing, merchandising, events, and more during a roundtable focused on genre titles. Here are the notes from the brainstorming session:

GENRE-SPECIFIC TIPS

YA AND TEEN MARKETING

How to get teens into stores:

• Partner with teachers and local schools
  • Join efforts like Project LIT [8], which works to bring culturally relevant titles into schools across the country
• Host a book club for exclusively for teens or establish a teen advisory board, where teens meet regularly, write shelf-talkers, review ARCs, and spread the word among friends at school
• Partner with organizations or other stores that have strong teen following to tap into their established audience
• Host NaNoWriMo [9]/Write the Night Off events
• Host ticketed events and workshops
• Don’t forget food and refreshments!

ROMANCE

Strategies to identify upcoming titles and how to promote them:

• Reach out to sales reps
• Check out Sourcebooks [10]’ 15-book starter set for bookshops that want to introduce a romance section in their store; ask other publishers for suggestions as well
• Join the Romance of Bookselling [11] Facebook group, where indie booksellers talk about titles they love and work to break the stigma the genre suffers in the bookselling world
• Reach out to the local chapter of Romance Writers of America [12]
• Invite a local romance writer curate a shelf or display in the store
• Put a jar on the romance shelf with a survey that asks what subgenres and titles customers would like to see; answers can be anonymous
• Host a romance-focused book club
• Promote upcoming titles via pre-order campaigns

FOR ANY GENRE

SHELVING AND DISPLAYS

• Use themed props, such as feather boas, puppets, or plush, to decorate sections
• Curate displays around the new season of a TV show, a new movie, or other forms of media
• Post signage that says, “If you liked [title], check out this!”
• Make displays for genre-specific awards, such as the Edgar Awards [13]
• Leave a note, similar to a shelf-talker, in sections that have popular titles with cross-genre appeal: “If you’re looking for [this title], we’ve stocked it in [this section]”

STEPPING OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE AND ENCOURAGING COLLEAGUES TO SELL GENRE TITLES

• Host regular meetings to discuss upcoming titles, which helps introduces books to booksellers who might not read certain genres. These meetings don’t have to be in-store; stores can host meetings at a local restaurant or bar to talk about books
• Set up a private Facebook page for staff where they can share their current reads and suggestions, or use services such as Slack or Basecamp to talk about book suggestions
• On Edelweiss [14], make notes for internal suggestion; send the Edelweiss link to the notes for each genre section to the rest of the staff and remember to report titles to the Indie Next List [15], Libro.fm [16], and regional organizations

REACHING DIFFERENT GENRES OF READERS

• Use social media
  • Like or retweet authors on Twitter to find their fans; search their name across platforms to find their fandom, as well as hashtags they might use
  • Tumblr is a good resource for finding diversity within genres
  • Create targeted Facebook events; ask authors you’re hosting in-store to promote these events
• Host genre-based book clubs or advisory boards
• Send out genre-specific newsletters
• Send postcards for an author event to customers who have purchased that author’s books in the past

TAKING ALL GENRES SERIOUSLY

• When talking about selling certain genres, attitudes of co-workers can be a problem. How can we work on that?
• Start a conversation among staff; be clear that making fun of a book is like making fun of a customer, and that genre readers read more than just that genre
• Explain that children are not shamed for reading genre fiction, so adults shouldn’t be either
• One store’s motto: Keep it classy, not sassy.
• Selling a book is selling a book; no matter what the genre, it helps the store financially