Instead of modelling a live literature event in a library on the traditional author talk and reading, it is worth taking a different approach. How about shifting the focus away from the author and towards the reader and the experience of reading?
When you think about an audience, you expect a group gathered together in one place, watching, listening and sharing an experience. While this is fine for many art forms, it is not a natural fit for a reading audience. Thinking about readers as an audience has led to an expectation that authors should read their work in public at live events in order to reach them.
Generating live audiences often works better over a concentrated time period like a festival – this isn’t easy for under-resourced libraries. Big names can pull but they often don’t need the extra attention. Attracting audiences to unknown writers is very hard for libraries unless they are hyper-local.
A reader-centred event can give a lot of space for participation. It offers the freedom to think about the reading audience as individuals, who share a lot in common in their reading lives, but not necessarily with the same author.
Of course, you don’t have to ditch the author – just ask them to share their own reading experiences and then invite the audience to talk about theirs. Successful authors read a lot – it’s the first advice you will receive in any creative writing class. Giving writers an opportunity to talk about their reading can be absolutely fascinating – you may find they welcome the chance to go in different directions from their standard presentation too. The links into their own work often go deeper as a consequence.
Events without an author can be equally appealing. Opening the Book were the first to run Wine and Books evenings. Here, an expert introduces a range of wines which are sampled by the audience, one by one, whilst carefully chosen extracts from stories with a similar flavour, or from the same country, are read out loud. This has been run very successfully in many places - and in one that required a noise abatement warning from the local police!
Desert Island Books can be a great format – though eight titles may be too many in our experience, make it shorter. Books that terrify you? Books that comfort you? Books that have made you laugh out loud? Come and listen to what others think - and bring your own examples to share! A rural library offered slots for people to book in to talk about their reading with one other person for an hour all on the same day. Library staff and library members made themselves available and shared their knowledge of different genres, topics and trends. They had more participants than for any other book event they had ever run.
Specialist book festivals such as the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival bring genre fans together and have the potential to open up space for audience members to meet as readers and talk about their reading lives. Opening the Book organised one such get together called Just Add Readers. This session grouped participants for crime-reading activities including a game of First Blood – match the first paragraph to the cover - and Gifting – bring a book to give away and write a tag with a message to the next reader. The illustrations above show the cards made for another game - What kind of crime reader are you? Lurid covers of early crime novels decorate one side – turn them over for conversation starters with one-liners to agree or disagree with, for example:
‘I don’t mind if the story plays about with my moral compass’
‘I like my crime with a generous helping of nostalgia’
‘I am curious about what drives people or organisations to step outside the law’
‘I find first person narration a bit too claustrophobic. I’d rather have a wider viewpoint’
Those who came for this pre-Festival afternoon event made connections which gave them company throughout the weekend. The ideas can be easily adapted into a library event.
… is quite simply the one you like best. You can discover it for yourself but we are here to help you find it.
In the retail sector, companies know a great deal about their customers and, when planning marketing strategies, they break their market down into very specific segments. This helps them to target their marketing more successfully. In the public sector, where we are committed to offering a quality service across the board, it is harder to adopt the principle of aiming specific services or promotions to specific groups.
Our research has shown that approximately half of the people coming into a library are looking for a specific title or author. The other half want to browse what's there and see what happens to take their fancy. This gives a 50-50 split in preferred method of choosing.
When we talk of resources we think of books, buildings, staff. But the biggest resource you have is your readers. They are plentiful in number, variety and imagination.
One of the biggest barriers to finding what you want is the sheer number of choices that exist. If you walk into a library, you see crowded ranks of spine-on books disappearing into infinity. It's a confusing and exhausting prospect for the browser who is not sure what they are looking for.
Starting with the reader and the experience of reading, rather than the author or the book, is the major change that Opening the Book has introduced into promotion.
Think about all the barriers that we have to overcome every time we pick a new book to read. Is this the kind of book I usually like? Is it too heavy? Too light? Will it bore/scare/offend me? There are many psychological barriers which prevent readers from taking risks with their reading.
Reader development takes an inclusive approach to whatever people are reading. We don’t need to make value judgments about the 'quality' of books as we shift the focus to the quality of the reading experience. It is quite possible to have a poor reading experience with a great book - most of us have experienced this at school or later in life.
What makes us think that the reader of romances is stuck in a dream world, an escapist, probably deeply unhappy with no social life? What makes reading a non-fiction serious book a virtue? What other prejudices have you noticed? What are science fiction readers like? What kind of life do readers of true crime lead? Have you ever heard someone apologise for their reading, 'Oh, I just read rubbish?'
Reading is something we do by ourselves in private. There are more readers than there are practitioners of any other art form but because reading is largely an individual and domestic habit, this is often overlooked. Imagine all the readers of a bestseller brought together in one space as happens with music or sport ....
The literature world concentrates mainly on writing and publishing. This is true of both the commercial sector and the arts funding sector. Opening the Book's unique contribution has been to introduce the concept of intervening at the point of consumption.
There are lots of different kinds of writing about books – reviews make judgments on quality, synopses summarise what a book is about, plot descriptions often have a cliffhanger sentence as an obvious way to ask someone to read more.