
5 Tips For Being Great at Recommending Books
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I spend a few hours every week recommending books to people on the podcast I host with Jenn Northington, Get Booked. People write in with their questions and book recommendation requests, and we answer them! Easy peasy– except not even a little, not at all. Everyone who recommends books for a living, from booksellers to librarians to people in the book media (hello!) have different techniques and methods. Here are a few that have worked for me:
I spend a few hours every week recommending books to people on the podcast I host with Jenn Northington, Get Booked. People write in with their questions and book recommendation requests, and we answer them! Easy peasy– except not even a little, not at all. Everyone who recommends books for a living, from booksellers to librarians to people in the book media (hello!) have different techniques and methods. Here are a few that have worked for me:
- Recognize Readalikes. If the person asking you for a recommendation is asking for a book that is like another title, you’re looking to match two things: motifs and tone. Motifs are recurring elements in a book that give it its particular flavor; tone is atmosphere, how light/dark the book is, whether it’s cynical, hopeful, funny, etc. For example, if someone asks you to recommend a book to read if they loved The Night Circus, look for a book that has similar motifs (magic, Victoriana) and a similar tone (romantic, lush, hopeful, tense). Comb your book memory for a title with all or many of those things; of course, if you don’t have an encyclopedic memory of everything you’ve ever read, you’ll need to…
- Keep Good Records. If you have trouble remembering what you’ve read, keep a book journal, an account on Goodreads, a spreadsheet, or some record of your reading life. It should be easily accessible, so when you’re at dinner with a friend and she asks you for a rec, you can pull it out and quickly consult it. For 201 level record keeping, add tags to each title for its genre and the format in which you read it. Someone wants an excellent audiobook about nature? I can find one in my spreadsheet in about three seconds. Need a romance that you want to read digitally? Done and done. I can even tell you if it’s available at our local library.