We have some big news for NoveList users: The appeal terms you know, and love have gotten a makeover. That’s right! We’ve cut our hair, changed our clothes, and switched out our glasses for contacts (cue some Patti LaBelle, please!).
Our appeal vocabulary was developed almost 15 years ago to help library staff connect with readers and give them great reading suggestions. The terms we have created have evolved since then, keeping pace with the ebb and flow of reading trends. But with all this growth, we realized it was time to redefine how our terms relate to each other, and other story elements like subjects, genres, or themes.
For the past three years (!), we've been working hard to develop our appeal vocabulary into more cohesive, stream-lined categories to reach the following goals:
- Distillation: Focusing on what is most important about the essence of the reading experience.
- Information retrieval: Ensuring consistent vocabulary so you can get robust and relevant search results every time you look for a title.
- Discoverability: Making it easier for you to find more book records and connecting similar books for better visibility.
We used feedback from NoveList library users and data (and a lot of passionate debate!) and have arrived at the following updates.
We’ve rearranged and renamed categories to make them more intuitive and meaningful.
- Mood replaces the term Tone.
- Style replaces the term Writing Style.
- Our Pace terms are now part of the Style category.
- Characterization replaces Character, detailing our character type terms (Flawed, Brooding, or Likeable, for example).
We’re combining similar terms.
- Accessible and Easy-to-understand mean the same things but were previously used for different audience levels. We’ve combined these two terms under the term Accessible.
- Sympathetic and Relatable are very closely related in concept so we’ve merged these terms into Sympathetic, which creates more meaningful matches.
We’re deleting problematic, unclear, and redundant terms.
- Courageous
- Quirky
- Awkward
- Compelling
- Engaging
- Mystical
- Jargon-filled
We’re renaming terms to increase clarity.
- The term Dramatic is used to describe cinematic books that feature exciting and larger-than-life stories, and not for books that are intense dramas or have back-stabbing social scenes with spiteful personalities (those are High drama). Because of this confusion, we are renaming Dramatic to Cinematic.
We are introducing new terms.
- Fun read: Think beach reads, escapist fiction, popcorn fodder. These books are lighter in tone and offer an effortless and enjoyable reading experience.
- Unputdownable: To help identify those books you just have to read in one sitting. These range in genre but tend to be heavier or more sinister in tone and/or topic. They might have higher stakes, and certainly more drama, and are the books that keep you up too late on a school night.
- Identities: Spotlights our 41 (and counting) character identity terms (Neurodivergent, Indigenous, or Muslim, for example).
We developed these terms to give readers access they have never had before. This reboot is a labor of love and we’re excited for you to explore and utilize our refreshed vocabulary to its fullest.
Cathleen Keyser is a Senior Data Strategist. She is currently reading American Rapture by C. J. Leede and listening to T-shirt Swim Club: Stories of Being Fat in a World of Thin People by Ian Karmel and Alisa Karmel.
