Fiction Display Ideas

Create displays of fiction for your bookstore.

Slipping into a fiction book can bring you into new cultures, introduce you to people you’d never meet in real life or send shivers up your spine. Reading has other benefits too, like stimulating the brand and exercising the mind. To encourage people to pick up some new “brain exercisers,” organize your bookstore’s fiction section to pique potential readers’ interest.

Recommendations

While it may take some effort, offering a recommendation for readers may result in additional purchases. Many websites have taken advantage of the “if you like this, you may like that” idea, where the page featuring the selected item offers options that others have purchased at the same time. In your store, little cards perched underneath the novels recommending other reading material in the same genre can help buyers find new favorites. A reader who comes in to purchase “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” for example, may be interested in other stories retold with a creepy side, such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim,” “Alice in Zombieland” or “Emma and the Werewolves.” You can even poll customers as they check out to get suggestions, jot them down, and compile cards during store downtime.

Local Authors

Give your shoppers the opportunity to pick up some books from local authors, ones who either currently live in your town or were born there (or possibly even feature your town in their books). While large chain bookstores don’t sell self-published books, you may not have that restriction and can request that authors drop off their books on a consignment basis. If you’ve got a collection of books traditionally published, you can break them out into a display featuring a little bit of information about the author, a picture and a list of the writer’s work.

What's Old is New

Just like flared pants made a massive revival from the 1960s into the 2000s, books also experience bursts of new readers discovering them for the first time. With a side table or couple of shelves in your store, you have the opportunity to show off the fact that what’s old is always becoming new again in the fiction world. When a long-time favorite fiction book is re-released as a movie, such as the 2010 Tim Burton release of “Alice in Wonderland,” the fiction novels often experience a resurgence of popularity. There are countless copies of the famed children’s story, with a variety of decorated covers, illustrations and bindings. Show off your collections of books, placing the oldest version alongside the newest copy, which often features a still from the movie and looks nothing like the original.

References

• Oprah: Watch This. No. Read It!