How to Get Your Book Onto Pinellas Library Shelves

Most authors chase bookstore signings and overlook the library. (See also what the bookstores here are like) They have the order backwards. A library will book you sooner, the room will be fuller, and the people in it are there because they chose your subject over a free evening at home.

Pinellas County has an unusual density of good libraries: the city systems in Clearwater, St. Petersburg, and Largo, the independent nonprofit at East Lake, the city library in Safety Harbor, and the others across the county cooperative. Every one of them programs events, and every one needs speakers. You might want two separate things from them, and the mistake I see most is confusing the two.

How do you get a library author talk?

You ask. Most authors never do, and that’s the only reason it fails. Libraries program constantly and staff need speakers who will turn up, be interesting for forty minutes, and not sell aggressively from the podium. If you can do those three things you’re more useful to them than you think.

Find out who runs adult programming at the branch. The desk will tell you. Send a short email with a talk title, three sentences on what attendees will learn, your relevant background in one line, and your availability window. Offer a subject. Nobody comes to hear about your book. They come to learn something, and your book is the reason you know it.

My own example. I spoke for an hour at the East Lake Community Library in Palm Harbor in September 2016, at the monthly Authors Showcase that Deanna Bennett organized. The topic was cybersecurity, drawn from my book Safe Computing is Like Safe Sex. The subject was what an ordinary person should do about their own computer, instead of what is in my book.

The questions in that room were sharper than most corporate audiences I’ve presented to, because the stakes were personal. Somebody had already lost money. Somebody was managing a parent whose accounts kept getting compromised. Nobody was there to look informed in front of a manager.

What makes a good library talk?

Teach one thing thoroughly. A forty-minute talk holds one idea, not the six chapters you wish you could cover. Pick the single most useful thing you know and give it away completely.

Leave a third of the time for questions, and mean it. The question period is where the room decides whether they liked you, and it’s where you find out what readers care about. You can’t buy that research.

Sell nothing from the front. Have books on a table at the back and mention once, at the end, that they’re there. A library audience will buy from somebody who taught them something. They freeze on a pitch. The staff who booked you’re watching how you handle it, because they decide whether you come back. Bring a signup sheet for your email list. That list outlasts the handful of sales.

How do you get your book into the library collection?

This is the other request, and it goes through a different door. Collection development is the professional side of the library, separate from programming.

Selectors buy with public money against written criteria, and they’re accountable for it, so the process is deliberate. What generally helps a local self-published book: A professional physical product. Perfect bound, a spine wide enough to print on, a cover that survives the shelf, and an ISBN that’s yours. Libraries shelve by spine, and if nobody can identify your book on a shelf, nobody shelves it.

Availability through the channels they order from. Libraries buy through wholesalers, and a title in the standard distribution channel is one they can order the way they order everything else. This is the same argument that governs bookstore shelf access, and it comes back to how you set your book up when you published it. Cataloging data, meaning the book has proper metadata: subject headings, a description that says what the book is, an author name that matches everywhere. Libraries run on catalog records, and a book that’s hard to catalog waits.

A local hook, where a local author has the advantage. A book about this county, this industry, this community, or by somebody who lives here and shows up here, answers the selector’s real question: will their patrons check it out? And a review, if you have one. Trade reviews carry the most weight and are hardest to get; a serious review from a credible regional publication also helps.

Ask at the desk how that system takes local author submissions, because the process differs between the city systems and the independent libraries here. Some have a form. Some route it to a selector by email. Some run a local author collection with its own criteria.

Why doesn’t donating your book to the library work?

Authors often try to shortcut this by donating books, and it seldom lands where they hope. Donated books usually go to the friends-of-the-library sale instead of the shelves, because a donation doesn’t answer the selector’s questions about whether the title fits the collection and whether patrons will borrow it. Acquiring is a professional judgment, and a free copy doesn’t change the judgment.

What does work is being borrowable, and having readers ask for you. If local readers request your title, the system responds. So the sequence is the same as with bookstores: build the local readership first, and the institutional shelf follows.

What a talk is worth beyond the room

A library event is thirty or forty people on a weeknight. That sounds small next to the numbers people chase online, and it outperforms them, because everybody in that room saw your face and heard you think.

The follow-on effects are what matter. Somebody in the audience runs a Rotary club and needs speakers. Somebody else is on a homeowners association board planning a series. A third person is in a book club that’s choosing next quarter’s title. None of that happens from a social post, and all of it happens routinely after a talk that went well.

Libraries also record and promote. Your name goes on a calendar, in a newsletter, sometimes in a local paper listing, and those pages stay online. For anyone building the kind of verifiable public record that both search engines and readers use to decide whether you’re real, a run of library appearances is worth more per hour than almost anything else you can do locally.

The libraries are also where the readers are

The library is the only room left in most towns where people go to find something to read, with no algorithm involved and no one selling them anything. For a writer that’s worth more than the events calendar. Sit in one for an afternoon and watch what people pick up, what they read the back of and put down, which sections stay busy. I wrote about that at more length in my piece on the Safety Harbor library, and it’s free market research.

The people who run these places are also referral sources, and they know every writer in town. A librarian who has watched you give a decent talk and not embarrass anyone will remember your name when somebody asks who could speak to their group.

Start with one email

Pick the branch nearest you. Find who does adult programming. Send four sentences: the talk, what people learn, who you are, when you’re free.

Then do it, well, for a room of thirty people, and do it again somewhere else. Three library talks make you a local author in a way that publishing alone doesn’t, and it’s the cheapest audience-building available anywhere. (See also what a Pinellas library card carries besides books)

If the book itself is the part that hasn’t happened yet, that’s my job. As a ghostwriter in Pinellas County, I can meet you at one of these libraries and work out what the book is. The rest of this cluster sits in the Writing in Tampa Bay hub, and the Discovery Intensive settles the shape before you spend a year on the draft.

From the author

Sell Your Books
Library talks are one channel among many in Sell Your Books. The book covers marketing without the hype, drawn from my own launches since I went full time in 2013.

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