Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week for you to watch at your convenience, and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please share with everywhere and anywhere with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries here in Nebraska, so in your state it may be the so-and-so state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries, so we will have topics on our show that are for all types of libraries. So you will find things for publics, K-12s, academic schools, universities, corrections, museums, archives. Basically the only criteria is that it's something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products sometimes all across the board. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in sometimes to do presentations about services and programs are running through the Library Commission, but we bring in guest speakers from across Nebraska and across the country sometimes, and that's what we have today. With us this morning is Laura Jones. Good morning, Laura. Good morning. And she is from the Indiana State Library and she is going to talk to us about some awesome, cheap, free, hopefully, ways to fill your shelves, excuse me, without draining your budget. So I'll hand it over to you, Laura, to take it away and tell us all about how we can do this. All right. Thank you so much, Krista. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'm Laura Jones and I'm going to talk to you, like Krista said, about some great resources and ways that you can fill your library shelves without draining your collection budgets. And here's a link and QR code. I made a wakelet board, curated all the websites and resources that I'm going to talk about or mention today. There's going to be a ton of websites and resources, so I don't want you to feel like you need to cram and write them down. After the show, all attendees will receive the slides and also a PDF with all the resources. So please don't feel like you have to rush to get everything down. First, I want to introduce myself a little so you know a little bit more about my background, even though most people just refer to me as that free book lady after hearing this presentation. And that's fine, too. I'll answer to that. I'm currently the Northwest Regional Librarian Coordinator for the Indiana State Library. And with that, I have 62 public libraries that I'm a liaison with for the state library. I visit the libraries and help them with training needs and questions. Previously, I was a K to 12 school librarian for five years and a public librarian prior to that. I'm also serving as the past chair of the Indiana High School Book Award Elliott Rosewater Committee. And I'm thankful to be reviewing titles for school library journal and library journal, which I've been doing since 2017. I post my book reviews and other things on my blog at librarianlora.com. And I'm also very active on books to Graham and Twitter and Goodreads. So a little bit about how this presentation came about. Over the period of about four years in my role as the school librarian, I received and donated over 2100 titles worth $31,000 to my school library. The titles all came to me free of charge through contests, giveaways, giving book reviews in exchange for titles. And I'm going to tell you about how I got started and give you a wealth of resources for how you can get free books for your own collections. And you can do this on a small scale and just use a few of the resources, of course, or you can go all out and sign up for everything kind of like I did. It just depends on how much time you want to devote to this. And I'm not an expert on any of these things, but I am happy to share with you my own experience. So let's begin. So how did I become known as Free Book Lady? Well, it all started with a few book reviews and a blog. I started reviewing on a blog many years ago, and I started out with a blogger because it's the only one I had used before. I used it in my library master's courses. So I started doing a blog for fun and just to provide friends and family with book reviews because I was reading and talking about them anyway, so I might as well put them out there. And then I started getting some free books sent to me and posts, then I started posting more frequently and spending a little more time on the platform and developing it. I didn't really know much about blogging at all. So I kind of taught myself through YouTube videos and googling a lot of questions in order to figure out how to use categories, tags, widgets, all that good stuff. That's right. And then once I longer, that was so easy to use back then. Yes, it was the beginning. Then I then I started to look at other avenues for getting free books. And I've compiled those together today was to share with you. So after I go through all the resources, I'm also going to give you just a few tips for starting a blog if you wanted to start your own blog to do book reviews. Alright, so first I'm going to go through a number of web pages and links that are all listed in the resource list I'm going to share. So don't worry about trying to write them down unless you really want to. First, I do a ton of contests and giveaway entries. These can be found in abundance in social media, especially Instagram, so the books to gram world, Twitter and Facebook. What I have done is follow authors, publishers, illustrators, and also other book bloggers because the giveaways are in abundance. And oftentimes all you need to do is retweet a post or share a post in your story or something like that. And as an example of some of the things I've won in the past, I once retweeted a post by an author books, Brooks Benjamin, a middle grade author. And by doing that I won five signed hard covers, books, wag and then an author visit for my students when I was a school librarian. So the sixth grade was pretty excited about that. I once just used a hashtag, hashtag child of books with a photo of a book that made a difference in my life and the publisher sent me a whole gift basket of books and swag. So like I said, it's usually just as easy as retweeting something or using a certain hashtag and you can win lots of goodies. An example of Facebook is just commenting on a post by an author who was giving away signed arcs of her forthcoming novel and authors and publishers and illustrators do a lot of promo giveaways around the time of publication of their new books. So if you're interested in any authors, I would suggest following them on their social media and watching out for giveaways from authors and publishers. So another website is called Bookster. On Bookster the giveaways change each month but you can enter all of them if you want. Also on Bookster you can keep a list of what you have read and what you would like to read. You can attach your blog and you can get followers on Bookster. It's similar to Goodreads though not as widely used and I prefer Goodreads overall. The next one is the Shelf Awareness newsletter. So the link to the newsletter will be shared with you but I highly recommend signing up for this newsletter. It's chock full of contests and giveaways directly from publishers. It includes books for all age groups and genres and in a later slide I'll show you some examples of things that I have won from that newsletter. And then Goodreads. Goodreads has thousands of book giveaway contests, early and finished copies. You can enter as many as you like. You can sort them by most popular. Ending soon recently added giveaways. You can also sort them by certain publishers or authors and then any book that you have on your to be read list. You can get a notification anytime that book is up for a giveaway. So that's handy because they'll send you an email and it'll just say a book on your to be read list is having a giveaway and then you can just click the link and enter the giveaway. So they make it easy for you. Next is Book Riot. This is an editorial book site that includes podcasts, newsletters, giveaways in all genres, children's, teens, and adults. And they have nine or ten giveaways listed at a time on their website. Book Bub. This is similar to Goodreads as well. There are recommendations and lists for books, but they also have contests and then amazing ebook deals. And then Book Page or Read It Forward is another newsletter that you can sign up for and they give out so many early copies free to contest winners. So Read It Forward is another one to check out. And then Book Page. Book Page is usually got one contest and one sweepstakes that update every month and the contests are great because I won one a few years ago when I worked in the public library and the winning box was five hardcover books and all you have to do to enter their contest or their sweepstakes is usually comment on their contest post. And then they also have great newsletters content, reader's advisory newsletters for librarians which are free to sign up for. And then lastly Book Sweeps has contests and giveaways and then free ebooks that are all sorted by genre for easy browsing. So I myself am a romance book lover and very proud of it and I would go to Book Sweeps and just sort for romance books and then enter those contests to make it easier. More contests and giveaways. So these are all sites that are more young adult YA focused. Many of these are just created by the publisher specifically to get their books into the hands of readers. The first is underlined and this was also once called first in line and it's through Penguin Random House. They allow readers to get early access to their arcs. They provide chapter samplers, deleted scenes, cover reveals, lots of swag and contests and giveaways. They also provide VIP invites to their events with authors and on numerous occasions I've received boxes of finished books from first in line when they just want to get their books out to readers and librarians. Novel NOVL. This is through Little Brown Books. They actually have a seasonal galley or arc request form that bloggers and librarians can sign up for on their website and you can choose kind of what books you're interested in and that they think you're a good fit. They'll send you those books for free to review. They also do a monthly novel box giveaway and this box is curated by a different author each month and it has that author's signed book and then a couple other signed books and then a whole bunch of books swag that's picked out by that author and I won the September novel box a few years back through the Twitter giveaway so I'll show you a picture of that in a forthcoming slide so you can kind of see what's in it. Riveted is through Simon & Schuster and on their site you can read full books online for free like early books and they also have two or three giveaways a month. Epic Reads is through Harper Collins. They usually have four to five giveaways a month on their site and they also have a great young adult author database with all the current tour information which likely most of those are online tours now but still still tours and then Fire Reads is through Source Books. They have a reviewer sign up on their site and also a one-time title request form so there's a Source Books book that you want to read you can go and just request it through their form and let them know you're a librarian or library employee or blogger whatever. They also have giveaways, excerpts, newsletters, and behind the scenes interviews on their website. And then are there any fellow teachers here with me? Maybe you've heard of teachingbooks.net They have amazing resources for teachers but they also have five or six book contests each month and their prizes are wonderful. I've won quite a few of their prize packs and use them in my library classroom so they actually have a specific page on their website devoted to their monthly contests. All right so this next slide are books where you complete reviews or complete kind of what you think about the book in exchange for getting the book for free. So book plate, yeah this one's hard to say, book per page turners. This is through Harbor Collins. They send you little small surveys about a book and your interests so they might send you a survey that shows two separate book covers and say which one do you like better or they'll give you like a quick synopsis of a book and then say if you had to choose which title do you like better or stuff like that where you can kind of help influence their decisions which is kind of fun and you receive free books in exchange for filling out the surveys. Most times they send you an e-book link but I'm excited to see kind of where they go with this because this one's a fairly new program through Harbor Collins and then book sirens. This is where you can connect your Goodreads account and then you receive an email with free early galleys that are digital early galleys to read and review and then you can report back with your review from the link provided kind of like Goodreads but the more you review back they'll send you more free perks. And Bookish First this is probably my favorite of late because they have really up their game so to speak and add a lot more book options on their site so Bookish First is free to sign up for anyone. You don't have to be a librarian or a library employee but what you do is you read their little book excerpt and you give your first impression which is a very quick feedback. It's not like a huge review it's just like would you want to read this book and why? I mean to the character sound enticing yada yada so once you give the feedback you get points and as you get more and more points on your account you can use those points to cash in and get free books but each time you give feedback on a book you can sign up to be one of the winners for that book and then they give away you know so many copies of each book that they feature on their account and every month they add quite a few books and you can give first impressions reviews to any of the books they feature and also be signed up to win them. You also get additional points if you share your first impression or your review on your Goodreads your Amazon your blog anywhere you share it you can add your link on their site and then you'll get more points so when you get 500 you get 500 points additionally when you first sign up and then you get 100 points for each time you say I like this book or I don't like this book or I want to read this book then you get 100 points for each review you post and give them the link for so it really doesn't take that long to get a lot of points added up and when you get to 2000 points that's when you can choose any of the books they have offered and they'll mail you a finished copy so it's really fun and I suggest trying to sign up for that one quickly Penguin Random House Reader Rewards this is one of my other favorites and this was formally known as First to Read it's a book love or loyalty program what you do is you can enter the proof of purchase for any Penguin book that you've purchased it doesn't have to be purchased through Penguin you could have got it through your book of the month subscription you could get it through Amazon you could get it anywhere as long as you have your proof of purchase you just take a photo of your receipt or a snapshot of your book of the month screen and then you get points for each time you purchase a Penguin product 10 points for each book once you get to 120 points you can choose any book on their website and you know Penguin's a huge publisher any book on their website up to $30 so this is an awesome way to get books I purchase a lot of books as gifts in random acts of kindness gifts on Bookstagram so I always purchase Penguin books for gifts and then I go use my points and get my own free books for purchasing the gifts so that's a win-win right there and it's free for anybody to sign up as well that's something I was wondering about here a lot of these I mean we are attending here right now I assume mostly for like you title your session said so you don't trying to get books for your library so you don't break your book budget but these almost all of these just anybody can sign up or participate in those contests as well too right it's not required that you're going to get the prize or the books for a library correct yep most of them are anybody and everybody can sign up yep nice for those of us that have our own little obsession but it's kind of like you said that's kind of great you can get something for yourself and then it rolls over and benefits with the points for that that Penguin one two the library too so everybody exactly yes so here's just a couple examples that I mentioned earlier just wanted to show you the novel box on the left there that's the novel box that I won it was curated by Don Kurt Kurtigic Kurtigic I'm not sure I'm saying her name right but she wrote the dead house and and the trees crept in so two of her books came signed and then two other books from other authors came signed and then a bunch of random books swag we all love the books swag right and then the second picture that's our picture of my sixth graders doing their Skype visit with Brooks Benjamin and so I gave away he he sent a box of swag with the signed hard covers so I raffled off the hard covers and then gave away the bookmarks and the swag and they were pretty excited about talking to him in their English class all right so these are some more resources where you can give your thoughts and get free books My Reader Rewards Club this is through Tyndale House Publishers there's not a huge selections of items to choose from but they are updated with new titles monthly and these include things like not just fiction or nonfiction but like fun things like coloring books like one month they sent a coloring book to review and then I received an email that they were publishing some colorable stickers and because I had once reviewed a coloring book they were just going to send me the stickers and see what I thought about that so I thought that was cool their website's easy to navigate and keep track of your past reviews and the titles that you order you get points on this as well and then you can order your free titles The Readers Lounge at Page Chasers this is a monthly sweepstakes website and they're mostly Christian fiction and nonfiction and you can choose one title at a time and once you get the title you review it and then as soon as you submit your review on their website you can turn right around and request another title that they have up for grabs so they also have ebook deals on their website Book Tasters this is something I kind of ran across on Twitter you can watch their Twitter feed and they'll feature a certain book so if you want to read one of the books they have on offer you can send them a message and then you get the digital book straight from the author it's very organized they also have monthly contests to make it like a game the actual owner of Book Tasters reached out to me when I asked about it and said they wanted to start as kind of a gamification so some of the titles you get are physical copies but it's mostly digital and it's fairly new too so it might it's hopefully going to improve the way it's kind of set up and working but right now they just had it through their Twitter feed library thing you might have heard of this they have a lot of early review opportunities you can receive an email each month with a new batch of review offerings summer physical summer ebooks you can request whatever ones you want to try to win copies for and they also have member giveaways to enter which are updated each month and then Baker book bloggers this is a Christian fiction and nonfiction publisher once you sign up you'll get a monthly newsletter with books being offered for review and you can receive any that you're willing to review and then you just share your review back with a link they provide and they're not looking for huge reviews most of the time they just want to know a quick succinct review what you think about the book and then you receive the physical copies in the mail to keep not ebooks which is rare these days we do have a question actually about arcs and I'm not sure if there is a rule about this but a question there wants to know can you put arcs in your public library collection since they're not what the book might look like in the end yeah I'm going to go over arcs pretty soon but I would say no because they're not actual the final book it doesn't have the final cover the final pictures many times some of the text is changed and the ISBN is not registered so yeah I would be that's a I'm going to talk about arcs yeah yep I know what some people do in some libraries librarians if we do with them they use them as giveaways or prizes for something for either a raffle or some reading prize or something and they don't go and they you know make it very clear that this is an arc this is people something might not be might be different but that it can be used in that way yeah yep that's a perfect way to use them yep all right so next this is just a couple of quick websites I want to mention in case you have kids or students that want to review books and get free books Penguin has their rookie reviewer program so kids have to fill out a consent form of course that needs to be signed or approved by a guardian or parent and then once it's sent in they can receive free books usually I think they my friend signed her son up and she got two or three books at a time and then they just asked the kid to give quick feedback through a link what they think about the books and then you can request more so that's fun for kids to do and kind of see their reviews being used by the publisher and one of the reviews my student or my friend's son did actually was featured in their newsletter later on and I sent him an email said hey there's your review and it just said his first name but it was really cool and then dojo books this is a very hefty website very lots of information on it that there's kids books giveaways and contests from publishers and it's geared specifically for kids so that's a great way if you have interested students or library patrons who want to get involved and then this is kind of a newer thing that I added to my presentation just because I found out about this very recently but book swapping platforms I love a good old fashioned book swap and I used to do them in the school but now they have these amazing virtual book swapping platforms so two of them have been around for quite a while book mooch has been around for quite a while and you can list the books you want to swap and then you get an email or a notification when someone requests one of your books that you have each time you send a book out to someone you get a credit and then that credit allows you to choose any book you want to receive from someone else so you go in there and you kind of make a wish list of which books you want and then when one's available they'll notify you hey you want to get this book and then you request to swap that book and that person sends the book to you so book mooch is one that's been around a while along with book mooch is paperback swap they're similar to book mooch although their website is a little bit hard to use because they have all these ads all over the place so it's kind of hard to see what you're doing and find the area that you're trying to look at however they do allow swapping of hardcover books audiobooks and textbooks even though they're called paperback swap but it's similar to book mooch in the fact that you can make a wish list of what you want and then you can also list like here's what I have available and then people request what they want to swap and that's done on a credit system as well so you know you send a book you receive a book and then the newest platform that I just recently started in 2021 I actually helped out with this a little bit did some kind of testing of their platform the owners contacted me and asked asked me as a bookstore grammar to kind of help them test it out so the platform similar to book mooch but instead of a credit system you keep a balance in your account and that way whenever there's a book you want shipped your funds are in there just to get the shipping and they use like the media mail price which is like usually under three dollars of book and then this way the person that's sending you the book doesn't have your address to send it to you the company the swap reads actually does the shipping to you so they do the address so it's very easy to use and the way their website is organized they also have this virtual guide that pops up and helps you navigate along to see like where do I go to list a book or where do I go to look for a book so it's a great a great way to use swapping platform and to kind of move some of your old books out or get some new books sort of there's a certain book you're looking for and can't find it copy anywhere you never know you can put it on your wish list and see if someone has it available so these are fun to do if you like book swaps yeah we have a question actually I think it's from the previous slide though that we were talking about penguin the penguin one on the previous so also what is the age is the penguin one for um good question I would say I thought it was something maybe like seven and up because I don't I don't think they do it for picture books I think it's like middle grade middle grade and YA that they do yeah nice thanks okay another way to to receive books these are going to take a little bit more of your time but I found this is a great way that I got books for my library when I was a school librarian I started reviewing books for school library journal and the way it worked was you receive a review copy well in advance you know read it submit your review and then when that book is published you get the final finished copy as a thank you so that you keep that kind of as your payment for the review so I always put those in the collection because I always reviewed YA books for school library journal and then library journal same kind of thing you receive a early copy review it then you get a finished copy when it when it's published so those are great ways to get some books if and especially if you want your reviews published which I thought that was really fun other review places could be book list you actually receive a fee a nominal fee per review printed so they they pay you a little bit if you have a review that's printed and they even pay you a little bit if you have a review that's rejected on book list so if you're looking to get some funds from your reviews you can check out book list and then there's also Voya I signed up with Voya but I found that they were very very particular with the wording of the reviews more so than even school library and library journal so I decided not to review for them but they do send you review copies and you can keep them so that's another avenue and then the links here go to their websites and provide information about how to sign up as a reviewer it takes a little digging to find on their sites but I've already kind of done that digging for you so if you're interested most of the time you just send your resume and a couple writing samples usually reviews that you've already done and then just a tip if you're going to sign up is to make sure and look at their publication first so you can kind of match your review to their specific style when you send your application because they very greatly from one platform to another and they all have word limits specifically they like very are very particular about how you phrase like your review and things like that but I find it found it and still find it very rewarding to review books and then receiving the book in the mail and then showing seeing your name in print is really cool with the review and the three books about rules for reviews but as I when I worked in a university library I remember reading book reviews and I can see why that would be a thing because it's very easy to read every single review from different books and they all kind of told you the same thing a short bit and the couple of the same parts so you could very quickly like compare and contrast because they all mentioned and described the book or reviewed the book in the same way in the same format and never really thought about that being something that they dictated to the actual reviewers yeah I guess that helps out when you're on the other end and reading these reviews to try and decide what to buy yeah yeah absolutely one example is just the I know from experience from school library journal library journal after you're like 250 words you always have to include a little sentence that says verdict in capital letters and that's kind of like a one sentence should you buy this book or not and so that's how they do all theirs and I really like I got kind of so I was used to what am I going to put for my verdict and that's what I think about I was reading the book so what's my final decision on this top title and then I mentioned that Indiana has a state book award committees and if you're in I'm sure many of you are from other states and most of you probably have state book award committees in your state and I encourage you to check those out I've been on the Indiana High School book award committee for I think six years now the Elliott Rosewater book award committee and being on that committee has a lot of work but it's very rewarding we helped choose the award nominees each year there's 25 books that are nominated for the award and then we get the books from the publishers sent to us so that we can read them through and rate them and figure out who's going to be the final 25 books so you get to keep those books for your library which is really nice and then a lot of times the publishers send you extra copies to consider for the next year's list so I got a lot of amazing books this way for my high school kids and then Indiana also has read aloud committee and a young Hoosier book award so they have them for all age levels but I was involved specifically with the young adult in high school books we have that here in Nebraska we have our the golden sewer award is the youth well the kids actually choose the winners of that so it's a youth selected award from them the children in the schools and we also do yeah the Rosie award I should have clarified that the kids vote and choose the actual winners but the librarians kind of find all the nominees right yes yes the librarians pick who are going to be the contestants the nominees and then the kids read and vote on them yeah yeah yeah so those are great ways to get involved and also network with other librarians and teachers and yes it's very fun to to serve on one of those committees a lot of work but very fun yeah and in Nebraska we have our book awards are done through the Nebraska center for the book which I know other it's that's a center for the book is something that each state may have their own center for the book and that's where our one book when Nebraska comes through there as well so that would be another thing to look into if you have a your state's center for the book they're always looking for people for nominations for the titles and then people to be on the committees to review them and then decide who are going to be the winners or the the ones that people vote on if you're doing like a and we do a statewide you know one book when Nebraska and you can vote on what's going to be the new the next book and everything yeah yep great ideas yes all right so my next slide this one talks about publishers newsletters so if you don't like to receive a lot of emails or get annoyed by newsletters this may not be for you but for me this is very lucrative as far as getting books because publishers and author newsletters have so many of these little clickable links in them where you literally just click and then fill out your info and they'll send you the book to review so most of the times they're arcs but a lot of times if they're contests you can get finished copies but these are just some examples of things that I've clicked and and received you can see the Marissa Meyer one down here at the bottom of sweepstakes but in this case this was a I think it's called monogamy maybe anyway you can request a copy of the book and then over here's a giveaway and this is requested arc and they actually sent you both books to to look over so newsletters are a great place to find free books and contests and there's a website called early word and early word has curated a list of all the publishers and all their imprints and all their library marketing contact people they're separated out into an adult list and a children's list and I've included both links in your resources this is extremely helpful if you have a book you want to receive early to review or make a purchasing decision you can look up the publisher and then find out who at the publishing company to send an email to and request that title from there's also links to sign up for each of their newsletters on the early word website and then like I said newsletters are a great place for giveaways and contests specifically for librarians early word is also has their own contests occasionally kind of in little sidebars like these little boxes with books featured to where you can sign up to win and then as you request and review books some publishers might invite you to be on their standing galley list to receive the titles either monthly quarterly or for special mailings some examples of that are what I was subscribed to when I was a school librarian I was on the McMillan children's list for standing galley so they would send me a a box of books every month they would send me like an email and say which ones do you want to review and then they would send me the actual finished books and then I was also on the Penguin Random House young readers standing galley list and they would send a quarterly email with a whole list of books and then you choose whichever ones you want and then every quarter you'd get the boxes as they published the books as they published in boxes and you'd get one of each copy you requested but they were finished copies so I would read those and then put those in the collection because those weren't were not arcs so that was a great way to get lots of books for my collection and then in a newsletter just as an example I responded to a newsletter from candlewick publishing because they said anybody that responds can get a free box set of Judy Moody books so it was like Judy Moody's anniversary and all you had to do was write back to the newsletter and say hey I want a Judy Moody box and then they sent me a free box set I believe there were like 10 or 12 books in the set for free that I put in my collection so it's just an example to watch the newsletters they are a great source of free books all right so how does this help my library these are a couple of what I like to call my book haul photos some people call book haul when they go to the used bookstore I'm guilty of that too but these are free so that's even better so this is kind of what happened when I left for summer break when I was a school librarian I would come back and open all the boxes and this is what I would end up with so the top ones just from a summer break two month break in the bottom ones from the 2016 two month break so obviously a lot of these books are galleys but there all are quite a few that are finished copies that I could put in the collection and then I'll talk about what to do with the galleys and the arcs but the students really liked having those as well along with the obvious benefits of the free materials these are great ways to network with publishers and authors get your name out there if they know you're interested in for instance the Harlan Coban book maybe they have another mystery author that comes out and they're like oh she wanted the Harlan Coban book maybe we'll ask her about this this other mystery author and send her one of those that happens quite frequently when they send mailings and then it's a great way to receive advanced knowledge of forthcoming titles to add to your collection and just to sum it up I was a school librarian for five and a half years at the school with a very limited book budget I'm talking like $1,000 a year for books for K to 12 so I pretty much could buy the the awards books and then I'd be my budget would be gone for the year for four of those years I signed up for like as many contests and giveaways as I could and did tons and tons of reviews and then I was on the standing galley list for Penguin and Macmillan and I kept a spreadsheet of what I received and donated to the library just for kind of information sake and I'm glad I did now because looking back there's quite a lot of books I received over 2140 books and they were worth over $31,000 so I gave that all to so my budget of $1,000 little pennies but the kids were like overjoyed to have new books all the time so I just kept entering contests and getting books and that's something someone's wondering yeah how do you yeah use a spreadsheet keeping track there's so many different contests and things yeah that that can I'm sure you can be buried and where did I get this one from and also which ones which contests or giveaways were easiest for you most successful you know keeping track of that yeah it's definitely the couldn't be overwhelming yeah yep and then I kind of like just made a report and submitted it to my principal and superintendent and I'm like hey you guys only get me this much on a budget but here's what I'm doing to get books for the library so just to kind of let them know that hey our library's got lots of books because of this and and they appreciated that too so it was it was good now I'm going to switch gears just to smidge and explain how to get a hold of arcs and digital arcs and then finally talk about a little bit of tips for book review and receiving free books so arcs the magical arc the advanced reader copy these are like getting more and more rare the fiscal arcs because of our great friend the pandemic the publishers are having trouble printing a lot because you know most people are a lot of people are telecommuting now and a lot of their warehouses are not staffed like they used to be but they're still sending some but arcs like I said earlier should not be added to a circulating collection because they're unpublished proof copies but they do make great prizes for patrons a lot of libraries leave arcs in their staff lounge for staff to read and keep up with upcoming titles or you could leave them in little free libraries for others to enjoy I'm guilty of that I drive around to the three or four in the very counties around me and leave them quite frequently you can swap them for other arcs through the Goodreads arc swap group or you can give contests if you have a twitter or a bookstore you can give them away and like a flash giveaway if you'd like but they're mainly used as marketing tools and they're in limited supply publishers also call them galleys and you're not supposed to quote directly from them if you review them because some of the text may change by the time they go to publication so how to get arcs so I'm going to show you how to get access to the digital arcs and get access to audiobook early audiobooks and then we've been talking about how to get access to physical arcs in all the various contests and giveaways and publisher newsletters but you can also do blog tours if you have a blog I do a lot of blog tours where PR companies will send you the book you'll read it put it on your blog and then you get to keep the book and oftentimes swag that goes along with it as a thank you for doing that and then you're not allowed to resell the arcs of course and if you receive an arc from a publisher whether it's digital or physical remember to thank that publisher and link to the publisher or the author in your review thanking them for the arc and letting them know that you received a review copy in exchange for an honest review so digital arcs DRCs many of you might know about Adelweiss and NetGalley because these are kind of the main ways that librarians and library employees get early copies to review they're known as e-gallies digital editions DRCs but what's the benefit of getting these early digital copies well if you have a staff who reviews books for your library's website or blog it's a great way to review the upcoming titles to create excitement among your patrons also you can get them early to make decisions on whether you want to order that book for collection development purposes and you can see what's coming up in the publishing world and read it to find out kind of which direction you want to go with your purchasing Adelweiss is the one that I use longest and you can submit your reviews on Adelweiss directly to the publisher and nominate it for library reads so Adelweiss shows like all the books that are going to be published by date and it's updated usually on Tuesdays Tuesdays or pub day but they put a lot more titles on each Tuesday and you can sort them by publisher you can sort them by catalogs from publishers you can sort by publication date virtually sort by anything to find titles and then if you want to download the title you can just click request and a lot of times if you request books from a certain publisher they'll whitelist you so that once you log into Adelweiss you don't have to click request and wait for them to notify you if you can read that book it'll just say download title and that means you've been whitelisted which is a good thing because then you don't have to wait to get your early book you just download that thing so once a book has passed its publication date though it'll be removed or expired from your device so like I downloaded the Ellen Hildebrand golden girl book the other day it comes out in June so once I get it read I gotta get it read before the pub date of course so I can review it but once the pub date happens it'll be removed from my device so don't want to miss out on that book Adelweiss has also started adding early audiobook copies to their offerings and Adelweiss is free for librarians and library workers and booksellers and teachers anyone can get a free account and then well anyone in those fields can get a free account and then you can start requesting books NetGalley is very similar to Adelweiss I find their interface a little easier to use it looks less bookseller-ish I don't know how to put that but if you go into both websites you'll see what I'm talking about NetGalley is just so much easier to use they show you the book title and it's just a lot more pleasing to the eye easy to use but once you download a book from NetGalley the best part is it doesn't like go away it doesn't leave after the pub date so I prefer getting books through NetGalley now that I found that out because if you don't get to the book in time of publication you can still read it and do your review a month or so afterwards but you can review books on NetGalley and once you review a book your rating goes up your rating is based on how many books you download versus how many books you send your reviews in for so you want to keep that in mind Adelweiss doesn't have that sort of tracking system yet but NetGalley does so if you download a book and don't get it read and then never review it your rating will be lower so just keep that in mind and then if your rating is higher you'll likely be approved for more free book copies and then NetGalley has recently added early audiobooks as well so those are great places to go to get early ebooks and like I said new book announcements and review copies usually come out on Tuesdays which are pub day you can keep track of which books you want to read by placing a little tag on them like highly anticipating anticipating or you can keep track of what you're currently reading on there as well kind of like Goodreads and then audiobooks this is one of my favorite resources to provide to librarians as well because these are both easy to use and if you are into audiobooks or even if you're not into audiobooks you will be after I tell you these websites I think Libro FM is a great way to get new and forthcoming audiobooks for purchase and review consideration anyone that's a librarian book review educator bookseller can download three audiobooks a month using a link that they provide you you sign up for their audiobook listening copy program their ALC program and then once you have access to that program they'll email you with a link each each month and say request your ALCs so when you go in there you just choose three audiobooks from their titles and then after you download them they're yours to keep they have a fancy cool app Libro FM app where you can just listen to the audiobooks right from their app and I love Libro FM I listen to audiobooks almost anytime I drive anywhere and they're great volumes is through Penguin Random House and they're newer but they offer a ton of new books and very popular books like bestsellers as audio options and to get signed up for volumes it takes a little bit longer because you have to fill out a form and then wait for them to flip magic switch so that you can download their audiobooks for free in the app but once you have their app you can see there's a section that says audiobooks for review and that's where you'll go to get any of those books you want for free and then with both Libro FM and volumes once you download the audiobook they're yours to keep so you don't have to like hurry and get it listened to by a certain time or anything like that so I would highly suggest checking those out and then like I said NetGalley and Adelweiss both have audiobooks now but I think since they're both trying to figure out how to make it work they're really hard to download I haven't even been able to figure out how to download one yet on NetGalley so I'm just using Libro FM and volumes until they kind of work out the kinks in their system I love downloading early books from Adelweiss and NetGalley but their audiobooks they're working on and I'm sure they'll get all the kinks worked out and then I mentioned early word earlier as a way to get publishers contact information and also get publishers newsletter sign up information but another thing is if you want a book if you want to read a book early you're a librarian or a library employee the publishers want to give you those books early and have you read them you're like the perfect audience for them so I used to be scared to ask well there's really no reason to be scared to ask because what's the worst they're going to say no okay then try again but early words giving you the person to contact so if you want to book from gallery press they're giving you like this is the person to send an email to and ask them please if you could have an early copy to review if you don't find a certain publishers contact info on the early word website a lot of times you can go to the publishers website and like scroll to the bottom and find an email address for like media inquiry or publicity requests or some of them call it influencer information so a lot of times they'll have information on how to request a review copy or some of them even just have a form now where you fill out like I'm Laura Dones from this library and here's my blog here's my bookstagram and here's the book I want to receive and then they'll just mail you the book so it's always better to ask and be told no than not to ask and not no so just make sure you say please and thank you and make sure you send your review to the person who sent you the book after it's done because that way they know that you you know took that seriously and reviewed the book and then just very quickly there are a lot of blogging platforms that you can use I mentioned I started with blogger and then that's all I knew at the time and then a good friend of mine said why don't you try WordPress so I switched to WordPress and did the free version for a while and then I switched over to have my own paid version and it's easy to use and navigate and there's a lot of options for design and layout much more analytics and stats information than blogger has and then it's easy to link it to your social media platforms and then use auto posting across different platforms so each time I post on WordPress it goes to my Twitter and Facebook page for instance and the free version of that is really it's very robust as well it's I mean it's a good way to get started on the WordPress free version yet it's not something you need you need to pay for with the hosting and all but and the more support so definitely just getting started to highly recommend that and then if needed if you get really into it and really busy yeah you probably would want to pop up to it but yeah it's a great website and there's so many helpful things you can find about WordPress to it like in their FAQs and their user guides and all that I did a lot of searching to figure things out a lot of community support of it too so yeah and then other places you don't have to have a blog if you're thinking gosh I don't have time to start a blog well you don't have to start a blog you can still post reviews without a blog you can put them on Goodreads you can use Amazon Vine although that's something where you have to kind of do Amazon reviews for a while and then you get the personal invitation from Amazon to be a Vine reviewer so you know you can put them on Goodreads, Amazon any type of social media Instagram Twitter YouTube and then TikTok imagine that TikTok is becoming a place for book videos and reels I haven't entered the TikTok world and I'm not going to because I've got too many other things going but I know it's being used for bookish content and it's really quite cool I'm sure they're making book dances as I speak right now on TikTok but the reels that people make with their books are really cool so these are just ways that you can if a publisher sends you a book don't worry if you don't have a blog if you need to review it just put it on Goodreads and send them the link or put it on Amazon send them the link that works too but if you do decide to start a book review blog here's just a few quick easy tips of course pick your platform attach your blog to all your social media outlets let people know about it the more traffic you get on your blog is the higher chance of free books you're going to get from publishers marketing yourself over and over again every time you do one yeah yep and every time you post make sure you tag those authors and publishers and use hashtags that go along with the book and the content try to post new content regularly you can schedule those ahead that saves me so much because I just schedule things on the weekend and then I have posts going out during the week when I'm busy with work and then make sure to interact and engage with people so if someone comments on your blog post you should comment back and interact with them and then you can add your reviews other places as well and put your blog link in there you know if you put it on Goodreads or Amazon you can mention your blog so yes, market yourself is a huge help when you're trying to get free books and then some review tips be wary of including your entire plot and your review try not to go past half of the story halfway point because that can be a spoiler in itself and just think about things that could be spoilers like oh the end of this book is so sad or well there's a huge plot twist at the end some people find that to be a spoiler I am guilty of that I sometimes do that in my reviews and I'm like I shouldn't do that because I just read somebody said those are spoilers I'm like they kind of are but anyway think about spoilers and try not to give them be specific about what you like and don't like about the book while also trying to remain neutral and objective with your own beliefs suggest similar titles and authors that remind you of this book so you know if you like this book try Ellen Hildebrand or this book reminded me of Mary Kay Andrews' book stuff like that you could organize your reviews into categories and then add a lot of tags so that people can find them post try to post your reviews a few days before the pub date of the book if you're doing an early book if you're not doing a forthcoming book don't worry just post your review but it's nice to post them around the pub date for maximum traffic and then cross posting them on all your platforms and then very important I think is to send a thank you and a link to your completed review to the very kind person who sent you that arc or digital arc and that way they'll know that you're serious and then that will up your chances to get set more books we do have a question about reviewing since you're talking about this right now that's convenient do you keep a spreadsheet for your reviewing to keep track of all you read and where you post you know you said you're keeping track of where your books from something similar for all the reviews that you do yes and I actually can share that if you email me I have this spreadsheet that someone shared with me and it's like so nice I used to just write them in my bullet journal which my bullet journal is just a book journal I don't do all that fancy bullet journal stuff but I used to write them and like make myself a little but now I just keep track of books by pub date and which ones I need to review a certain month and date and then someone sent me a spreadsheet that has become a godsend because it shows like the number of pages the pub date when my reviews do who sent me the book all that good stuff so I can keep myself organized yeah they said they would love to see it yes perfect so whoever wants to see that if you see my email on there please send me an email I'll be happy to send you that and you can like save it and use it it's a google doc I believe and like and that kind of goes into my next point I am like extremely eager and willing to talk to anybody who has questions I love to help people with this kind of thing because it's kind of my passion to you know books are my passion obviously but I love to help people so feel free to email me I would love to help you if you have questions on anything or need help getting started and then if you're on Twitter Instagram Goodreads YouTube anywhere I've got all my links so you can find me and and we can talk books so please contact me and thank you so much for listening today I hope you learned some things and I hope the resources that I'm going to send will be useful as well oh definitely no I think this is great Laura so many libraries are struggling with budgets just as usual that's unfortunately the norm it seems across all types and sizes of libraries and some are littlest ones too like you said a thousand dollar budget if anything and even smaller sometimes and what do you do to at least have something new and something for your community whether it's a public library or a school library I think these are some great tips and some of them I had heard of and have used myself library thing is one that I've been in netgalley just my own personal not working in a library but so many that I had no idea about but oh and comment thank you this is a comment from one of our attendees your presentation was so full of great information and very relevant yes thank you and so if anybody does have any questions you still want to ask of Laura while we're still here go ahead and get it into your question section as I said the slides will be available you can always contact her later too the slides the links to the the way that she has put together she's already sent me the slides so we'll have them up when the recording goes up I'm gonna I'm gonna pull back present your control to my screen now so I can show you where all that is and while we're waiting to see if anybody does any last minute questions we are a little after 11 o'clock central time but that's okay we you know don't have to cut off if you guys still want to ask questions or talk about anything feel free to type in there into the questions section but this is the page there we go yes this is our session page for today's show if you go to our Encompass Live page and if you use using your search engine of your choice type in Encompass Live so far we're the only thing called that on the internet nobody else is allowed to use that name and you'll find links to either our main page or our archive page these are upcoming shows but our archives will be right here and their most recent one is at the top of the page here so today's will be right there at the top should be done with it by the end of the day tomorrow at the latest that usually is how long it takes me to process the go-to webinar recording get it up onto YouTube and have all that done everyone who attended today and registered for today's show will get an email directly from me letting you know when it's ready here and I said we'll have a link to the recording a link to the slides here is I just to show you this is the wake lift that Laura I typed it in when it was on the screen so you can see all the different links and things that she's got here that will help you jump to all of these different great resources and her website libraryandlar.com very easy to get to that too in our archives here I'll get some comments coming through I'm going to go through these first actually so thank you this is wonderful back to the students now they got to go back to the students but thank you for the helpful information yeah oh and someone else commenting about something they use too yeah very enjoyable presentation Susie says I use library thing a lot for a work project and also personally I've gotten some free books and I'm hoping to get back to doing reviews more consistently yep yeah library thing is a great resource you don't know about I mean we talked about getting the books library thing is a you kind of have your own online personal online catalog of the books you own I use it to keep track of my own books and then they do also do the give you the review copies if you want to have those as well all right so as for our archives here yeah they'll be posted here and while we're here I will show you as you can see here you can search our show archives the entire archive or just the most recent 12 months if you want to just find something recent and we have those those just couple of limiters there because this is and I'm not going to scroll all the way the bottom this is the full archives of our show Encompass Live premiered in January 2009 so we do have over 10 years worth of recorded shows and they are all here so just do pay attention when you're watching a recorded show to what was the original broadcast date that's what's on here so you know when it actually came out some of our shows will stand the test of time book reviews of course certain things but some things may become outdated or services and products may have changed or no longer exist anymore links may be broken we don't have always the time to go back and fix everything but we are librarians we archive things keep things for historical purposes as long as we have the internet and all of these on youtube to be hosted for us we'll keep them up there but just do pay attention to the broadcast date so you know if something might be old or not vector me page and just some more thank you it was great presentation we do have a facebook page that I linked to for encompass live you can see that over here or we post reminders about today a show to log into speaker information when our recordings are available from previous shows new things added to the schedule so do if you do like to use facebook give us a like over there we also do post onto twitter and instagram I think that's the elements we're using so far and there's always should be the hashtag and comp live for anything that has to do with our show that we've used so keep track of what we're doing there as well so uh doesn't look like there's any other questions so thank you so much everybody for attending thank you so much Laura for joining us for today this is some great resources I'm going to go and start using these for myself maybe thank you I hope you enjoyed it yeah next week we're actually going to be talking about doing reviews our next week's topic is a friday reads pandemic reading is the name here at the library commission we've been doing a friday reads program for quite a few years since 2014 it says there or our staff will just post their book reviews on our website and we have them all collected together in one place where you can see them all so we have a some of our staff here we'll read something or just post about a book they're interested in and we thought we do since we're now a year I think it was this week when I first started working from home due to the pandemic talk about some of the books that we've reviewed over the last 12 months so there's going to be five of us on the show from our staff and just talking about some of the books that we've read over the last year and what we thought about them so definitely join us to get some like you're saying ideas for any books you might want to add to your collection it's awesome all right so thank you everybody thank you Laura I think that will wrap it up for today's show hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of encompass live all right thank you yeah bye bye


Well, hello everybody and welcome to my talk. Thank you for coming Yeah, there it is today, I'm going to talk about tomorrow's generations perspective on WordPress My name is Tico the Valk.  I Worked at Yoast for three years as a support engineer and Besides that this year. I started my own web development agency But let's let's dive a little deeper into my childhood. I Like to say that I grew up in WordPress as I'm a WordPress kid My parents are Joester Falk and Marika von der Racht who owned the company Yoast until about two years ago So all my vacations existed of me going to the Google offices and me Having to walk around in Legoland with my yo shirt on You could say that I was tortured with WordPress. I Once wanted to try out a different CMS and my parents found out about it. I Didn't get any food for the rest of the week That's a joke. I love my parents But one what I want to say is even though I grew up with WordPress There are still some things that I don't like or that I think can be done better so What do people my age think of WordPress? To support this I've done a small survey amongst my peers and people in my social circle Which I'll get back to during this presentation in this presentation I'll talk about three reasons why WordPress feels appeal to young people Firstly being it WordPress is not focused WordPress marketing is not focused on young people and Secondly WordPress is hard to get started with Thirdly WordPress does not look appealing or as appealing as its competitors so as I just mentioned I did a small survey amongst people my age and I asked them to check the books boxes of the logos that they recognize two of these logos where WordPress and Shopify and Yeah Almost 60% of the people I surveyed were they recognized WordPress Which I think was quite a lot. This does not mean that they know what it is They just recognize logo But now the thing that I found weird is This exact same amount of people recognized Shopify Which is weird, right because we're much bigger. So they should recognize us more So why is that? Well, as we're aware young people don't use the same social media as all people do WordPress social media networks mainly on Twitter newsletters Facebook I guess I don't know. I don't have Facebook While young people use YouTube tiktok snapchat Instagram and we know that influences are really important a Study done by HubSpot shows that one in three Gen Z years has bought something Recommended to them by an influencer in the past three months So coming back to that question why did the same amount of people recognize? Shopify as they did WordPress It's because Shopify does market young people This is a screenshot from a video from mr. Beast. If you don't know who he is I hate to break to you. You're old This is one of the biggest YouTubers in the world at the moment. He has over a hundred fifty five million subscribers and Almost 40 billion views across all of his channels This guy's big In this particular video he traveled to Antarctica where he Went in the middle of nowhere. He started to climb a mountain for six hours He got to the top and he named it Shopify Which I think is an insane marketing stunt because this mountain is now actually called Shopify So I think we a WordPress should should do something like this as well Moving on to my second point WordPress is hard to get started with. I Had to say this is what you see when you start a WordPress site Welcome to WordPress. Thanks. I can learn more about the newest version. Why would I want to do that? My site health status. Is it sick already? What happened? I can create a quick draft. Why would I want to do that and I can attend an event. Yeah, I'd never do that So it's not clear what to do it's chaotic While our competitors, they do have a clear startup path If we take a look at Shopify, for example You don't this is not even the first thing that you see this screenshot You first see you first get some questions about the kind of site to run and based on that you get this setup guide Shopify will help you set up your site They'll help you add your first product to help you customize your online store. They'll help you personalize your own store The same goes for wix they do the same thing You get some steps and it will help you customize your store If I wasn't forced to work with WordPress I would have quit right here because Well, yeah It's not clear how to get started. You'd rather have something like Shopify wix And this correlates with my third point WordPress is not that flashy. It doesn't look as appealing as a competitors. It's older, you could say So as I mentioned before I did a small survey amongst my peers and I also showed them three Screenshots of different interfaces one of Shopify one of wix and one of WordPress and As I expected 75 percent of people liked the wix or Shopify interface better than WordPress But how could we fix this right? Because we want to And we should well Recently newcomers released who express which I think is a great solution for this it Looks cleaner. It looks it's a not it's a lot nicer to work with I feel like and It helps you set up your site so it solves the setup guide issue as well But that's only for newcomers, right? So how we solve this for the entirety of WordPress Extendify is a good solution for that Extendify helps Users on board their WordPress site extend if I sells to hosts. I think they're here at the conference right now So go ahead and talk to them But they make it easier to get started with your WordPress site, which is something We should look into So now what I've mentioned a couple of solutions already But let's let's get them straight once again. We should start with Social media that is focused on young people Social media like tiktok face. No, not Facebook tiktok snapchat Instagram and YouTube and we should collaborate with influencers To promote the WordPress brand Then we should make WordPress easier to work with with solutions like Who Express and extendify which will make it more appealing to a young audience? but We can make it more appealing, but we also have to get the brand known because apparently same amount of people know Shopify, so We should fix that as well and To do that. We shouldn't keep promoting our own brands We should all collaborate and promote WordPress together a good example of this was a couple weeks ago When WordPress and 20 years old. Yeah, I know big four years old and me and We all the big brands celebrated WordPress they didn't celebrate themselves. They celebrate WordPress and This is one of the big advantages that Shopify and Wix have over us. They are one brand They are one company. They make all the money, which means they can spend Whatever they want on advertising. Well, we we can't do that so we have to collaborate and Do the marketing together Which means we all have to become the WordPress marketing team and we might end up with a mountain got WordPress as well