Prompt week 6

 What would be an innovative way to promote the Romance Genre at my library?

February is a great month to promote the Romance genre (oh, but Valentine's Day was yesterday!). 😉 Still, the fact that the Romance genre generally promotes strong professional women means it also might be a great March (Women's history month) display.

I think developing a display in our open lobby is a great way to catch people's eyes. To make the display more integrative I think it would be important to include books, videos, DVDs, and then also have a flyer that lists a number of books and audiobooks available through our electronic resources site. 

So far you might be saying "Janna, this sounds pretty boring" and I would agree. Of course we can make the display catchy, with bright colors (red hearts, yellow and blue and red flowers that evoke the coming of spring). It would be really nice if the display could be a sort of "booth" that people could enter, but this would require some additional work since we don't have one in our lobby. I also think it would be fun to have a little "selfie" station as part of the display and encourage people to take a picture of themselves with their favorite romance novel. We could create a hashtag - #mphplromance. Our marketing people could make sure those get linked to our Facebook page as well as other social media sites. Maybe (if we get their permission) we could put up some of the patron pictures on the display.

Additionally, I'd like to put up pictures of famous people with their favorite romance novels. I don't have an instagram account but that might be a good place to go and find pictures that we could post at the display. This would help mitigate some of the negative publicity the romance genre has gotten (as mentioned in Wyatt & Saricks, 2019, p. 215).