Every month, staff here at Publisher Spotlight develop and mail clients Best Practices advice to help small publishers develop new ways of making better discovery possible for potential readers and collection developers. At Publisher Spotlight ourselves, we make use of half a dozen social media channels to spread word about great reviews, programming ideas to expand a title’s role for local audiences, and awareness of the fabulous creators behind the board books, picture books, early readers, chapter books, graphic novels, audiobooks, and more from our client publishers.
Staff member Tracy Gallagher, our Special Projects Librarian, created a best practices tip sheet about the ever-expanding power of Pinterest that we think everyone–readers, booksellers, librarians, and families–might want to take up to improve on your own Pinterest use. Without further ado, here’s the word from Tracy:
Perfecting the Art of Pretty Pins
You might ask why we are moving to pretty pin creation. Isn’t Pinterest a dying platform? Doesn’t it only want to show video pins now? What about that shopping feature?
- Because Pinterest is a hybrid visual search engine and social media platform, we have found the use of high-quality images not only “stops the scroll” through the home feed but it also builds interest from the user to click through to other pins from that creator (or board).
- Pinterest rewards creators of high-quality pins by showing them more frequently in the home feed of users who have interacted with another of your pins. This creates engagement between the creator and the user.
- We have found a Pinterest board showcasing all the titles we are promoting at a conference to be both a substitute for a virtual conference and a great visual reminder for visitors to our booth during in person conferences. We keep the board live so that it can be revisited again after the conference is over and our visitor is possibly looking to beef up their next order.
What makes a pretty pin?
Pins that are likely to stop the scroll tend to feature a clean image, against a background, with text on the pin. We want the user to stop, read, and think about taking action (purchase) prompted by what the pin image has to say. It prompts many scrollers to click on the pin to read the description. The Pinterest search engine can read clean fonts on the pin image and will use this text, as well as the title, description, and URL, to respond to searches.
Why make your own?
Pinterest rewards the act of repinning in their algorithm. Therefore, to draw interest to both other accounts and your own, we suggest you
crea
te some pins in house and re-pin others from your active Pinterest boards. Your self-created pins will go to the landing page you desire on your website along with using the annotations you create for the pin descriptions. Additionally, having pins made by multiple sources creates a more diverse look to a board which is more interesting to the user.
The shopping tab
I want to talk a bit more about that shopping tab feature I mention above. Every title I have searched for recently does have a pinnable image on Pinterest. They tend to link to Walmart or Amazon. We don’t like to encourage our users to head to either of them for more information about a title. Our preference is for them to go to your website or to a source such as indiebound.org for purchasing. We feel the result is more beneficial to the user in both cases which means they will continue to click on your pins. You can see the shopping tab in the lower right hand corner of the pin.
Visit Publisher Spotlight’s many Pinterest boards to see how Tracy and other staff here at Publisher Spotlight have put her good advice to work.
New from Cicada Books, let’s start by dipping into 
choices made for practical reasons. Tilbury House Publishers’ 
For a broader perspective of architecture in action and mysteriously complex building methods from history, check out this pair of 360 Degree-imprint books from Tiger Tales Books. 
Otter with illustrations by Margaux Carpenter of such amazing buildings as the Egyptian Pyramids and the more recently constructed, and still quite old, Taj Mahal.
This month 
approach to fiction. That being said, I didn’t immediately gravitate to the idea of writing my own King Arthur story. So much has already been said, with many incredible works out there, I didn’t want to just rehash that material. Then one day, a scene just entered my head. A boy returning home after his training, but he’s too late. His home is destroyed, and everyone he knows is gone. That was my way in.
TYLER: Funny you should mention my publishing company, A Wave Blue World, because the very first title we published was called Adrenaline and James was the artist. We were both right out of art school and I really liked his style. Working on that project was a huge learning curve, but we made it through to a produced a really worthwhile book, even if it was a little rough around the edges. We had been working on separate projects for a little while after that, but as soon as that scene that I mentioned earlier entered my head, I knew James was the perfect artist for an Arthurian-type adventure. I reached out to him and he was really into it.
From Gecko Press, let’s start with Ole Könnecke’s picture book 
The Olympic Games often are settings for new records of speed, distance, height, and other measures of physical agility and prowess. What would athletes have to achieve to compete with the speeds, sizes, and other capabilities of other animals? 
If your child’s chosen sport involves a bicycle, Cicada Books has an essential title: 
Has all this talk about athletics made you a bit hungry? Thanks to Readers to Eaters, there’s the perfect sports-aware book for that, too! 
Earth Is Big, coming from 
New just last month from Inhabit Media (Nunavut, Canada) is I Am Loved, a picture book by Mary and Kevin Qamaniq-Mason, with illustrations by Hwei Lim. This one provides a story of foster care and a child’s need to recognize that love comes from both his beloved and absent grandmother and his caring foster parents. While culturally specific to Inuit values, the concepts of fostering and learning to recognize both present and absent care providers directly addresses the intent of Parents Day’s honoring of those with children. Inhabit Media provides a 
recalling for her how the judge made them real sisters. Beautifully evocative illustrations by Nicole Tadgell show the sisters in imaginative play as well as real world memories. This book is available in both hardcover and paperback and has won numerous awards and critical praise.
A parent’s many nurturing jobs include creating healthy ways to handle emotional development difficulties. From Blair Publishing (North Carolina, USA) and hot off the press 
Anne Booth’s 
There are new editions of a couple of classic favorites available this May, too. From Gerda Muller, 
published as a picture book in 2018. In a new edition, it’s also available as a board book, allowing the very youngest readers to explore all the colorful blossoms that appear in spring, from those that poke through the snow to those that bloom as spring edges toward warmer days of summer.
Let’s start with Ivan Brunetti’s beginning reader book 
The California Reading Association’s Eureka Award Honor title 
This time, however, we discover where and how the title idiom is phrased in other places. Each such phrase is provided in its English translation; the point here is how different languages, and cultures, rely on specific reference points even when speaking imaginatively. Idiomatic phrases can paint engaging and intriguing images in our minds’ eyes, as does the artwork here.
Finally (just for now) we’ll end with a picture book told from the perspective of…a dictionary! 
A new board book series for English (and also for Spanish) readers from NubeOcho Books includes a pair of lift-the-flaps fun from author and illustrator 
Did you know Inhabit Media has published a kids’ cookbook? 
This year’s Thanksgiving holiday will be marked differently from other years in many American households. It also coincides with the 400th anniversary of the colonial founding of Plymouth, in the 17th century Bay Colony of Massachusetts, credited traditionally as the site of “America’s first Thanksgiving.”