Want to get your book in the library? I just put together, with the help of my associate Keri Barnum, a mailing that went out to more than seven thousand librarians. The e-blast contained eleven books, each promoted with a book cover, sales copy, and links to the sales page(s). Some books did better than others in terms of clicks. We’ll see whether any of those clicks result in those books getting on library shelves.
Ironically, right around the time we finalized the library mailing, I finally read an article that my cousin Joe Diamond had forwarded. The Washington Post headline pretty much sums up the story: An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.
“I always be sneaky,” young author Dillon Helbig admitted in a YouTube video. So, when he decided he wanted other people to read the 81-page Christmas adventure he’d written and illustrated in his red, hardcover notebook, he snuck it into his local library. When no one was looking, the second-grader slid “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Chrimis by Dillon Helbig His Self” onto a shelf in the library’s children’s picture book section.
“It was naughty-ish,” Dillon admitted. But, as he put it, “I’ve been wanting to put a book in the library since I was five,” which is when he first started writing books. He even added a sticker to the notebook’s spine so that it would look like the others on the shelf.
That book now has an official library sticker. When the library found the “stowaway” book, they liked it. It had all the criteria they look for in a book, one of the librarians said. And so, with permission from Dillon and his parents, they added his to their collection. According to a Washington Post article, “The library even gave Dillon its first Whoodini Award for Best Young Novelist, a category the library created for him, named after the library’s owl mascot.”
If you want to check out Dillon’s book for yourself, however, you’re going to have to get in line. There’s already a substantial waiting list. In the meantime, Dillon is working on a sequel, as well as a new book about a closet that eats jackets.
I always tell my clients that as much as they would like to become bestselling authors, it’s impossible to know whether a book will become a hit. But I’m putting my money on Dillon.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.