Hot on the heels Vibeke’s post about book trailers, my mind this month has turned toward promotion – specifically, how best to promote my library’s Romance collection.
Now that it’s February, I guarantee that if you were to walk into your local public library you would find a nice display of Romance novels. Heck, walk into your local bookstore and you will find the same thing: Romance, Romance, and more Romance.
Not that this is a bad thing. As the official month of love, promoting the Romance genre in February seems a given. After all, what better time is there to celebrate the Romance genre? Really, it’s a no brainer. And when it comes to dreaming up ideas for new displays and promotions, whatever is easy is what we librarians seem to like the best.
As I was putting up this year’s Romance display I couldn’t help but wonder why we seem to limit ourselves to promoting Romance in February. Not to say that we don’t promote some books and authors throughout the year, because we do. However many of us don’t seem to make as concerted an effort to support Romance as we do in February.
There are libraries out there that are stars in promoting Romance at their libraries. RWA recently recognized those libraries with their Libraries Love Romance contest (see the finalists here and the winners here). But while those programs are ones to admire and emulate, I have a sad feeling that they are few and far between.
I’m hoping you can prove me wrong. Tell me about your library. Do they celebrate Romance all year long? If they do, let me know how. I am very curious to hear what other libraries are doing and put their ideas to the test at my own library. Do you have a suggestion for what you would like to see libraries doing? Let me know that as well! 
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Hmmm. Sadly, my library does not celebrate romance all year long.
Although, they do have a huge display of books when you walk in with all the librarians top picks for the month. A lot of those ARE romances.
My closest library has the most pathetic romance section I’ve ever seen. Every time I want to donate novels, they say they’re “updating their system.” As my hubby is in systems, I feel like volunteering his services just to get books on shelf.
Once they finishing updating (whenever that will be, it has been over a year), I have boxes of books for donating. I’ll easily triple their collection.
I was just at my local library and there’s not a smidge of display to celebrate romance novels during this month of love.
I live in the city of Los Angeles, so we have about a billion branch libraries. Most I have visited have a popular book section or paperback section which include romance. I haven’t seen any displays for February/Valentine’s Day – at least as of this weekend. What I like least about our romance section is that most category and paperbacks (non trade size) are not included in the electronic catalog. They’re only listed as XBranch Paperback – so unless you see it on the shelf, it’s impossible to get a specific book from a specific author. I feel like romances are generally treated as second class citizens.
I’ll be stopping by my local branch to check them out tomorrow. My local RWA group meets in a library. The people there are very kind and we’re setting up a book signing with them for later in the spring. A friend of mine told me she had a very successful book signing in a library but I’m no aware of any of the local ones doing much promotion all year long.
My local library hides the Romance in the stacks. What little they have of it. I’ve tried looking up by author, and in the whole state-wide system you can only get best selling authors part of the time, and hardly anything in the current year.
My library in Issaquah, WA was promoting romance books for the month of Feb, and I picked up a steamy novel I’d never heard of……it’s called Gianna
by author Peggy Somers.
How sad, Alice, that your library hides romance. One of my all time favorite authors, Diiana Gabaldon is known as historical fiction but her books are full of romance!
[...] there have been some wonderful individual programs at libraries around the country. Kelly Watson posted a great column on them a week or so ago, with links to the finalists and winners of the RWA’s “Libraries Love [...]