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| Photo by Abhi Sharma |
ETA (1/21/19): The archived webinar is now available! Go forth and learn!
You all. Yesterday, I attended the first free webinar in a new series on genres that NoveList and LibraryReads are partnering up to present. It. Was. Fantastic.
Even before the webinar started, attendees were suggesting their favorite sci-fi novels and talking about subgenres in the chat (which continued throughout the webinar - I copied and pasted the chat into a Word document to save it and it was 33 pages).
This first webinar in the series was on Science Fiction and I found it very engaging and helpful. We got an overview of the development of the genre from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to what's new and trending today. The slides had TONS of suggestions for books along the way. I could tell that they paid attention to being inclusive with many female authors and authors from different cultures and ethnicities represented.
After the overview of the genre presented by a member of the LibraryReads team, a NoveList team member spoke about appeal factors in the genre and how to use NoveList to search for books for sci-fi readers and narrow the searches down to find a great match. I think you'd get the most out of it if you're a NoveList subscriber, but even if you're not, there were still tons of information about the appeal factors in the genre and book suggestions that would are useful.
This webinar was a bit like my Reader's Advisory class in grad school boiled down to one hour. I LOVED that class, so I was definitely nerding out. If you are unfamiliar with genre fiction or just want a refresher or if you're not confident about searching NoveList or if you have staff that aren't using NoveList because they don't know how, this is a FANTASTIC RESOURCE.
The webinars are centered on adult reading, though there were definitely YA titles that I spotted throughout. If you work with teens or adults, it's well worth watching.
The full schedule of genre webinars for the year is posted on this NoveList blog post and the webinars will be archived in case you can't make the actual time. As soon as the sci-fi archive is available, I will post it.
ETA: The archived webinar is now available! Go forth and learn!