Day of Dialog: From the Street to the Spirit
By Francine Fialkoff & Rebecca Miller -- Library Journal, 6/15/2006
More than 300 librarians, publishers, and distributors met in a free-for-all at LJ's annual Day of Dialog, chewing over hot titles and trends in areas ranging from street lit to spiritual living. Hosted by LJ Editor-in-Chief Francine Fialkoff and sponsored by National Geographic, DCPL, Barnes&Noble.com, Hachette, HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, McGraw Hill, Sterling, and Baker & Taylor, the daylong program took place at the National Geographic Society auditorium and courtyard on May 18 just before BookExpo America (BEA) got underway.
A spirited panel on street lit emphasized the need for more critical reviews to guide buying. Pat James of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh noted that she often sees 13-year-olds and their mothers reading street lit. “Older readers have Zane in one hand,” she said, “and a book on women in the Bible in the other.” Librarians called for more YA street lit, audio street lit, and bibliographic direction about the genre.
Editors from Atria, Ballantine, and Dafina talked about their titles, and librarians suggested resources they use to identify selections, including Blackbook, Essence, RAW Sistahs, Mosaic.com, Blackexpressions.com, Vibe, Source, and Caribou Books, as well as patron requests, vendor lists, and other libraries' OPACs. In response to a query from King County's (WA) Angelina Benedetti about how to sell the genre to more conservative colleagues, Baltimore County's Lila Wisotzki responded, “We had the staff read [street lit] and come together to discuss it.”
At the end of the day, a panel took on spiritual living, a publishing niche recently covered by LJ in its Spiritual Living supplement (5/1/06). Greg Stielstra (Christian Trade Book Group, Thomas Nelson) cited a sudden awareness of the popularity of lifestyle books written from spiritual perspectives. Mark Tauber (HarperSanFrancisco) said he liked the coinage of the term “spiritual living” but added, “I'd almost flip it around and call it 'living spiritually.'”
Book groups 2.0
Chesterfield County PL's (VA) Neal Wyatt and Queens Borough PL's (NY) Kathleen Degyansky roused the audience after lunch with vibrant ideas about how technology can transform book groups. Degyansky described how videoconferencing has allowed authors to “visit” the library from places like Red Lodge, MT (Mark Spragg, An Unfinished Life), and host authors for programs in distant libraries, as when Michael Cunningham (The Hours) visited the library to videoconference with a book club in California.
The panel, including library marketing whizzes Amy Baker (HarperPerennial) and Sarah Pucillo (Random House), also saw potential in webcasting as well as podcasting, though they agreed with Degyansky that those technologies limit audience participation in comparison to videoconferencing.
Wyatt described various book group formats, including some in which patrons knit or cook while they talk books and others where nonfiction is the priority. The idea, Wyatt noted, is to “break the deadlock of one book, one leader” that currently rules the book club model in many libraries. Audience members who asked for more help from publishers were encouraged to contact the library marketing departments. “Partner with us,” Wyatt urged publishers. “We are the experts on our readers.”
For a list of some of the books previewed at Day of Dialog, including those titles editors mentioned on the Hot Books for Fall panel and at BEA, go to www.libraryjournal.com/dayofdialog.
