New buzz - Updike fires back

Washington Post’s reporter, Bob Thompson wrote a great article this weekend, Explosive Words, you don’t want to miss -especially if you’ve been following the buzz about last Sunday’s NY Times article, Scan this book. Thompson was at BookExpo America where John Updike created his own buzz with comments about the article.

Thompson writes:
Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly's notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling "performances" or "access to the creator." ("Now as I read it, this is a pretty grisly scenario.")

Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of "information" on the Web, he said, "books traditionally have edges." But "the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.

"So, booksellers," he concluded, "defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

I’ll leave the discussions about the impact of this article on libraries to my fellow bloggers but keeping to the theme of marketing, I wanted to point out that the article also refers to some marketing ideas that caught the writer’s attention:

Booksellers wore advertising on their name tags ("James Patterson Rules Summer") as they strolled with dazed looks through cavernous aisles filled with publishers' booths.

Are we doing this enough? After all, Name tags are really mini billboards, at eye level of everyone we meet.

Google has been coming to BEA for three years now, but it seemed a bit more visible this year. Maybe it was the fleet of subcompacts with "Google Book Search Mobile" painted on them that cruised the streets around the convention center offering free rides to people with BEA badges. Maybe it was the cookies bearing the phrase "Just a taste -- Google Book Search" thrust at conventioneers near the main entrance, or the lavish party the company threw Friday night at the old City Museum.

Okay, so you may not be able to paint a fleet of cars with your library’s logo but the cookie idea is clever! What kind of neat marketing tricks have worked for you lately? If you prefer to email me send to ndowd@njstatelib.org

Tags: outreach marketing ideas