For the past eleven years, NextReads has shared more than 26,000 reading recommendations with library patrons across the world. We’ve sent more than 2,300 unique newsletter drafts for you to make your own -- and that’s not even including the two weekly New York Times Bestsellers or the monthly LibraryReads newsletters.
Since then, we’ve moved from our site at nextreads.com to a new, more powerful home in LibraryAware, freshened our look, and made some small adjustments to our content. We’ve also added newsletters since our 2006 launch:
- Picture Books and Kids Books (2007)
- Tween Reads (2008)
- Fiction and Nonfiction New York Times bestsellers (2009)
- LibraryReads (2016).
We’ve noticed some things along the way. It’s been no surprise that our general fiction newsletter (Fiction A to Z), as well as the Mystery and Thrillers and Suspense newsletters have always been our three most popular, but it’s been fun to see how quickly the Kids’ Books newsletter took off.
We’ve also been tracking reading trends, of course, which brings me to the point of this post. When we started, science fiction and fantasy were pretty distinct genres -- one represented by robots and aliens, the other by wizards and elves (ok, HUGE stereotype, but bear with me). But over the last decade, we’ve seen:
- More genre-blurring and blending between the two genres
- More overlap among the readerships
- Genres that don’t fit comfortably in science fiction or fantasy (hello, steampunk!), but are part of the speculative fiction family
To better serve these readers, we’ve decided to combine the Science Fiction and Fantasy newsletters. What this means:
- Science fiction readers will get recommendations every month, instead of every other month
- Readers of both newsletters will be exposed to more and different books.
- The pool of books we have to draw from will be that much stronger, and we’ll be better able to match what’s on your shelves in genres that have books go out of print pretty rapidly.
On the nonfiction front, we’ve decided to spin the content that has been found in the Business and Personal Finance newsletter into existing newsletters, expanding their content coverage in logical ways:
- Mind and Body Fitness will be renamed to Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise. It will include:
- all the content it has historically (books on relationships, health, parenting, and so on)
- plus career advice
- and personal finance
- The Biography and Memoir newsletter will absorb the memoirs and biographies of business leaders
- The History and Current Events newsletters will take on the more economics-minded and financial history books
Lastly, given the launch of the Book Squad emails and all the book display ideas (with signage!) that come from them in a variety of topics across audience levels, we’ve decided to discontinue the Book Display Ideas newsletter. You will still be able to find book display ideas in the NoveList databases, and of course we encourage you to sign up for Book Squad emails.
How (and when) is all this going to happen?
Look for these changes in May -- and don't worry, we'll be reminding you before it happens.
While these changes are fairly minor, we understand you may have questions. Feel free to reach out to us with any concerns or questions you have. Look for more communications coming soon, including links to promotional content in support of the new Fantasy and Science Fiction newsletter to share with your patrons.
Shauna Griffin is the NextReads/ADEPT Supervisor at NoveList.