207. An Interview With Robin Bradford, Genre Avenger and RWA Librarian of the Year

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 207 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.  With me today is RWA Librarian of the Year Robin Bradford.  We talk about how collection development works, what her responsibilities are, and how she acquires different materials for her library system.  We also discuss acquisitions, methods of cataloging, and how things have changed since she started her career as a librarian.  We also talk about greater inclusivity in library collections and on librarians accepting and acquiring self-published materials, which is a pretty crucial topic given how much increased racial and cultural representation is found particularly in self-published genre fiction.  So if you are nerdy-curious about librarian-ing – librarian-in-ing? – librarian-ing – librarian-ing; that’s a word, right?  It is now – if you’re as nerdy-curious about librarian-ing as I am, this is going to totally rock your world, ‘cause I had such a great time doing this interview.

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And now, on with the podcast!

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Robin Bradford:  Okay, I am Robin Bradford, and –

Sarah:  Yay!

Robin:  – right now I’m living in Tumwater, Washington, which is on the western side of Washington, so about an hour south of Seattle, and I am one of the Collection Development Librarians for Timberland Regional Library.

Sarah:  All right.

Robin:  And I buy fiction, adult fiction, and DVDs, music CDs, large print, audiobooks –

Sarah:  All that.

Robin:  -foreign language.

Sarah:  Okay.  Now, I have to say, you are my, your title is my second favorite kind of librarian title, ‘cause I know there’s, there’re lots of different librarian titles, and my personal favorite is always Adult Services Librarian, because that just –

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – that just sounds so excellently wrong.  But Collection Development Librarian means that you go shopping with an enormous book budget.

Robin:  Yes!  Yes.

Sarah:  That must be just horrible.

Robin:  You know, it, it, it is awful, but you learn to adjust.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So you buy a crapton of books for your library system.

Robin:  Yes, and, you know, it sounds like it’s a lot of fun, and it really is a lot of fun, but I’ve been doing this since 2001 for, first for Indianapolis and now here, and the amount that has changed in the past fifteen years is tremendous, so, it’s, it’s a lot harder than it used to be –

Sarah:  Well –

Robin:  – which is good, because that means that you’re buying more things.

Sarah:  Well, it, yes, but it also means that someone has, as I put it, someone has turned on the world’s largest fire hose full of books and aimed it –

Robin:  Yes.

Sarah:  – at everybody.

Robin:  Yes.

Sarah:  Like, there’re so many books to be purchased for libraries now.

Robin:  And when I started this it was, you know, you look at PW and Library Journal and Booklist, and there was something called Choice Reviews, which I don’t even know if that still exists.  It was a little more academic, but I worked at a main library in a big system, so we bought a lot of those academic titles as well, and those were the things, the New York Times Book Review, you know, The New Yorker, and that was your collection, and it has just changed tremendously from that, which is fantastic.

Sarah:  It’s great, but it also must make it very difficult to figure out what it is that you want, even though, you know, you know, fifteen years ago you had a handful of review sources, now you have hundreds and hundreds of potential review sources, and, and –

Robin:  And –

Sarah:  – lots of different options in trying to figure out what to buy.

Robin:  Yes, and I use review sources a little bit differently than a lot of librarians do.  A lot of them really depend on, you know, what others have said about a book and try to evaluate it that way.  I use it for discoverability.  That’s where I find out about a lot of, especially literary fiction books.  That’s where I find out about a lot of them.  I’m not so much concerned about whether a reviewer liked it or not, because that doesn’t really indicate whether my patrons will like it or not.  I’ll buy it if it’s got bad reviews but I think that it would check out and people would be interested in it, so I use reviews a little bit differently, but now in, you know, in addition to reviews, there’re also just websites full of links to new books.

Sarah:  Oh, yes.

Robin:  And that’s where I find a majority of the genre fiction books that I’m buying –

Sarah:  What –

Robin:  – ‘cause they’re not reviewed anywhere.

Sarah:  What are you buying that isn’t reviewed?

Robin:  I shouldn’t say reviewed anywhere.  I should say, they’re not reviewed in the journals that we normally use.

Sarah:  Oh, I see what you’re saying, right, ‘cause there’re not a lot of romance reviews, and if there are romance reviews it certainly can’t begin to touch the total number of books that are published in romance.

Robin:  Exactly.  Exactly.  And, and usually the reviews are the people we already know.  They’re reviewing an Eloisa James?  Well, I don’t need a review for that.  I’m going to buy it regardless.

Sarah:  Right.

Robin:  You know, they’re reviewing a Nora Roberts.  Well, that’s wonderful, but – [laughs] – you know, I don’t really need a review to tell me to buy the newest Nora Roberts.

Sarah:  Yes, this is true.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  ‘Cause you know, you already know your readers, your patrons want that.

Robin:  Exactly.  Exactly.  It’s the little cozy mystery, you know, that just started, the new cozy series that just started that – gosh, what was one that I saw yesterday that was knitting and recipes or whatnot?  That’s the stuff that people are interested in, ‘cause it’s a new series, they can get in on the ground floor, but no one’s reviewing that.

Sarah:  What specifically do your patrons like the most?  Because I’m always fascinated by the difference between what publishers say is selling, what authors and self-published authors say is selling, and what librarians are buying, ‘cause often those are three very different things.

Robin:  [Laughs] That’s true!  Let’s see, in romance, small town is still pretty hot.  I would say that paranormal here is on the decline, and it may even be a sharp decline.  Motorcycle clubs, if they take place in a small town –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  – fantastic.  [Laughs] If not, eh, kind of hit or miss.  I just got an email from a librarian maybe a week or two ago that a patron came in and was happy that they were seeing so many diverse romances in our collection, and I think specifically she was talking about our digital collection, but I’m not positive about that, but – so that’s another area that people are interested in seeing, so.

Sarah:  So you have to acquire both the print books for the library and the digital books for online borrowing.

Robin:  Right now, yes.  We just hired a, an electronic librarian who will handle all of our eBooks, downloadable audio, and databases, so I will be –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Robin:  – getting rid of digital buying –

Sarah:  Ohhh!

Robin:  – in the very near future.

Sarah:  Are you looking forward to that, or are you sort of going to miss it?

Robin:  Both.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  I’m looking forward to it because I have a lot to do.  If I didn’t have physical AV on top of fiction, then I would want to keep the digital, but I do –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Robin:  – and if people don’t get their DVDs they’re very angry, so – [laughs]

Sarah:  Ohhh, yes.  I, yes.  Because there’s some weird –

Robin:  So I need –

Sarah:  There’s this weird gap in the timeline.  Like, a movie comes out in the theater, and then it shows up on streaming and in DVD in a different sequence.  It feels like every time it’s slightly different –

Robin:  Yes!

Sarah:  – and at a different distance, and you don’t know how long from the theater date to the DVD date, and if I didn’t want to pay fifteen dollars a person to go see it, or however much it is with, you know, once you buy the ticket and then the snacks, and then you go to the bathroom four times, there are some movies I’m just like, yeah, I’m not paying that much money for that, but then you wait forever for the DVD and the streaming to start.

Robin:  Yeah, and sometimes it’s really fast!  Sometimes I’m like, but that was just in the theater!  So you can’t really, you can’t really tell, but I spend a lot of time watching trailers of movies that I’ve never heard of?

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So –

Robin:  But they have big-name, big-name stars in them, and I swear it’s because I’m in a small town now that things just don’t come here.  Like, if I lived in Seattle I probably would have heard of these movies, but because I don’t, I, I, they just don’t come here, and they’re a big surprise to me.

Sarah:  What are the sources that you use to figure out what you want to buy for your library?  ‘Cause I know you still have the main ones; there’s still Kirkus, there’s still, you know, Romantic Times for genre, and, and there’s still Publisher’s Weekly, and I’m assuming you have similar sources for movies and DVDs and television show boxed sets, but what sources do you rely on a lot more that maybe other librarians don’t know about?

Robin:  So for mystery, my favorite one is a blog called Stop, You’re Killing Me!

[Laughter]

Sarah:  That’s a great name!

Robin:  Which I absolutely love, and they have a month-by-month list of what’s coming out in hardcover and in paperback, and it’s fantastic!  I, I live and die by that list.

Sarah:  [Laughter] ‘Cause you have a lot of mystery readers.

Robin:  Although it’s interesting – yes.

Sarah:  You have a lot of mystery readers in your patrons.

Robin:  A lot of mystery readers.  It’s interesting that that list is becoming less and less inclusive of all the things, all the books that I’m finding.  So, for instance, I’ll go to Edelweiss, and you can search by format and by date, so I’ll put in, you know, mass market paperbacks for July 2016, and I’ll see a lot of things that haven’t made it to Stop, You’re Killing Me!  So now Edelweiss has become a very big part of where I go to look for books, and they’re great with small press –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – and indie press, so things that aren’t showing up in the usual journals or sometimes on the genre sites, that’s, you know, I’ll go there.  There’s one for science fiction and fantasy, and I cannot think of the name of it right now, but they’re – and I will send you a link because it’s fantastic, and they also do a straight list of what’s coming out in the coming months by month.  It’s hard to look at because it’s just title, author, publisher, and it’s a, just a big list.  I have to increase it on my computer to, like, 150% –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  – so that I can look at it without dying.  [Laughs] But as far as –

Sarah:  Small type is the devil.

Robin:  Yes!  Yes, it is!  Especially when you’re just looking at a page full of text!

Sarah:  No, no, no thank you.

Robin:  [Laughs] Like, I wish that they were links or something, but they’re not.  They’re, it’s just, it’s just words.  It’s just words!  And it’s hard to, it’s hard to read, but it’s the best site that I’ve seen for science fiction and fantasy upcoming books.

Sarah:  That’s cool!

Robin:  So I wish that there was something better, but I haven’t found it yet, and if anybody out there knows what it is, I would love to know.

Sarah:  And this is probably what librarians talk about when they get together, right?  Like, where do you find the things that you stock and your books, and what the hell is going on with this publisher, and how many cats you have now?

Robin:  Absolutely!  [Laughs] No cats, but, yes, yes, we all want to know each other’s secrets and how we can do better and do more in the time that we have, which isn’t a lot.

Sarah:  When you’re – one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is the fact that you go on Twitter, and when you’re doing acquisitions you start tweeting all of these covers –

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – and you talk about, like, why is this font like this?  What is happening with her head?  What is going on with this book?  Which is, which is a really cool thing, I think, because, one, who doesn’t want to know more about books they haven’t heard of?  And given the fire hose of books, it’s really hard to distinguish yourself sometimes.  But two –

Robin:  Yes.

Sarah:  – you are highlighting what you are seeing as a librarian, which is a unique voice in, in and of itself, and also, you’re critiquing what is happening in the way that books are presented, so it’s brilliant, and I, and when we were talking about doing this podcast you told me you couldn’t believe that you’d been doing it for so many years.

Robin:  Yeah!  It, it was, I went back to my old Twitpic account, and I think 2008 or 9 or – it just doesn’t seem like it’s been that long ago, but it really has, and it started as a way for me to distinguish the books, because, like you just said, there’re a lot out there, and some of them are very similar.  Like, these twelve have duke in the title.  These fifteen have rake in the title.

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  You know, these twenty-five have girl in the title.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  Thank you, yes. So – [laughs] – you know, these ten have girls drowning in water or – it’s just, there’re so many, and you can get to the point where, have I ordered this already?  I have.  Or, I think I’ve ordered this already, but it’s not in the catalog, so –

Sarah:  Or nine authors use the same variation on a stock photo and you’re pretty sure you’ve seen the photo before, but not that book.

Robin:  Exactly.  Exactly.  And so I started that as a way to kind of imprint in my mind what I was seeing, and then I guess I thought it would be a good idea to tweet it, but – [laughs]

Sarah:  Well, that’s always a good idea!  Don’t ever second-guess that idea.  That always, that always ends well.

Robin:  Sometimes, I always think, you know, sometimes I think, maybe people are tired of –

Sarah:  No.

Robin:  – the collection development tweets –

Sarah:  No.

Robin:  – but –

Sarah:  Nope.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Nope, not tired.  Nope.  Nope, nope, nope.  Because, one, you’re, you’re funny!

Robin:  But I love when people –

Sarah:  You are funny.  You’re like, what is happening right now?  Like, you do, like, mi-, okay, (a) you do micro-cover snark, which is, of course, one of my favorite things.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But two, you are in a position where you’re spending an enormous amount of money on books, and you have a lot to say about the books that you’re buying, and you’re a very unique kind of consumer, one that I don’t think readers hear from a lot from the consumer perspective.  You know what I mean?

Robin:  Right, that’s, that’s true.  That’s true, and when you talk about the fire hose of books, it’s like, it, it’s hard for librarians to remember sometimes that we’re seeing a lot of things, and everyday, average readers, even if they’re power readers, don’t see as many books as we see, so that’s always kind of a –

Sarah:  No.

Robin:  – a thing to remember when we kind of get snarky amongst ourselves about, why don’t people know about this?  And – we see a lot of things.

Sarah:  Yes, you do!

Robin:  We see a lot of things, and what’s new to us – like, for instance, the new Daniel O’Malley book, Stiletto, which, if you haven’t read The Rook, please read The Rook, but so his new book is, I just came across it in a July list, and I’m like, gosh, I read that four months ago!

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  You know, it’s just, it’s, it’s just, it’s hard to remember sometimes that new to us and new to the reader or the patrons that we’re serving, not the same timeline.

Sarah:  No!  I, I struggle with that too, and I’m sure I see things later than you do, but when I, if I get a, an email with links to NetGalley widgets for ARCs or I get ARCs in the mail, I just, even if I know it’s an ARC, in my brain, that book’s appearance has been assigned a date or, or a period of time –

Robin:  Right!

Sarah:  – or a season.  I’m like, oh, wasn’t that a spring book?  Nope, nope, late summer.  Oops!

Robin:  Ex-, exactly!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And I have to track it because when I talk about a book, if people want it, they want it right then, and, and I always joke –

Robin:  Right!

Sarah:  – that, you know, I’m, part of my job is to help enable everyone else’s poor impulse control, because I have none, and if I’m talking about a book, people want to be able to, like, click it right then.  Like, not, not, I’m going to write it down, not adding it to a wish list.  Like, no, I want it now.  Give it to me right this minute!  So I have to track, like, when things actually show up so I don’t screw up and make somebody mad.  That must be very strange for you to be like, up, nope, bought that last year, bought that six months ago.  Oh!  It’s, it’s new now!  Oh.

Robin:  Yeah, and, and I get a lot of tweets from people who are like, oh.  That doesn’t come out ‘til October, and I’m like, I’m so sorry!

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  I’m buying it now, but yes, you can’t buy it until – [laughs] – I’m so sorry!  I feel bad!  Especially when I’m doing things like, every once in a while I’ll tweet some ARCs, and I try to tell people, I’ve started telling people the release date now so that they at least will know, and they can decide for themselves if they want to make a note or, if they’re librarians or reviewers, try to get the ARC or –

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  -or whatnot, but, yeah, it, it can be disheartening for people when they see something and they’re excited about it and they can’t get their hands on it for another three months.

Sarah:  Yep.  It is, it is a very sad thing.  It’s –

Robin:  And I feel bad, because it, if –

Sarah:  I to-, I totally feel bad.

Robin:  – if, if it were me, I would feel the same way.  As a book addict, I would feel the same way.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.  And you’re, you’re a different kind of power reader and power user of books, too.

Robin:  Maybe.  In my work life, yes.

Sarah:  Yes.

Robin:  But in, in my reading life – [laughs] – if I can’t get ahold of an ARC of something that I really want, I am just as sad as the next person.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Robin:  To, to have that long wait.

Sarah:  Yep.  I have to ask you a question.

Robin:  A, a lot of times when I’m seeing things and I, there’s no ARC available, it’s just as bad for me too –

Sarah:  Oh –

Robin:  – ‘cause I’m like, oh, I really want to read that!  Am I even going to remember in six months?

Sarah:  Oh, no, and tracking what you want to read in six months is very difficult.

Robin:  Yes!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Dear Future Self, here’s what you want to read.  Uh…

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Well, I’m not, I’m not in the mood for that anymore.  I’m sorry, but no, that’s not what I want to read, ‘cause my future self can feel like –

Robin:  Exactly!

Sarah:  – no, all I want is, all I want is young governesses with surly duke employers in the rain.  Like, I’m in the mood for that particular trope, and, you know.

Robin:  Absolutely.  [Laughs] And we’ve probably got some books for you then!

Sarah:  Oh, with dukes in them?  There’s never going to be any shortage of dukes ever.  Ever, ever, ever.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So when you are acquiring versus when you’re reading, do your tastes overlap?  Or do you have to sort of go, okay, I have to read this for work to figure out if this is going to work, and there’re other things where it’s just like, I want to read it right now, ‘cause this is my thing?

Robin:  There’s a lot of that last thing.  I want to read it right now, ‘cause it’s my thing.  I don’t –

Sarah:  So you should totally be a librarian.  You are in the right field.

Robin:  [Laughs] That’s why I’m here, yes.  I don’t read a lot for work.  Like, right now I’m reading some things because I’m moderating a panel at Day of Dialog, the day before BEA –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – and so I’m reading a Susan Elizabeth Phillips right now, and that’s not my normal thing, but it’s actually really good, so.  Conference time is usually when I end up reading for work –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – but as far as reading galleys just for ordering, I would never get anything else done, so I don’t do a lot of that.  And a lot of the times the galleys that I’m seeing or the books that I’m ordering aren’t meant for me.  Like, they’re not, I’m not the target audience, so if I were to read it and be critical of it and decide not to buy it, I’m disenfranchising a lot of my readers, because – especially literary fiction.  I’m just not a lit fiction person.

Sarah:  No, me neither.

Robin:  So, you know, that, that kind of stuff, I just have to go by what the blurb says, what the review says, do I think my patrons will like it, and go with God on that, ‘cause that’s not my thing.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  One of the things that you talk a lot about and talk, talk a lot about online and that you and I talked about in our email is the inclusiveness and increasing diversity of books, and how to put more of them in readers’ hands, and how to have, make sure that there are more of them available, and I know that there are a lot of, there’s a, there’s a lot of, of, of effort, I think, now, like, happening right now, to pay attention to the fact that readers are saying, no!  I want my experience in my books that I read now, not in eighteen months.  I want it now.  But so much of what is being done to be inclusive is done in self-publishing, which is hard for you to put in a library, if I understand correctly.  I know every li-, I know everybody, library, every library’s a little bit different, but that it can be very challenging to get self-published books into a library in some ways.

Robin:  It can, for a lot of reasons.  The first reason is, there’re a lot of self-published books –

Sarah:  No!

Robin:  – and when you think about – I, I, it’s crazy but true!

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Robin:  When you think, when you think about all the traditionally published books that you have to go through, and then to try and add the hugeness of the self-publishing world on top of that, you’ve run out of time to do anything else.  So that’s one of the main things is just where do you find the time to look through the amazing amount of self-published books?  And then on top of that, a lot of Collection Development departments have collection development policies that don’t even allow for non-traditionally-published books, which is a leftover from I’m not even sure when, but that has to change, because that’s – self-published books are not just the guy around the corner who stapled together his manuscript and brought it into the library like a book report.  I mean, there are actual –

Sarah:  That used to happen.

Robin:  Yeah, yeah.  It still happens!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  It still happens.  It still happens; people think, you know, that they don’t have to put any professional effort into their material, that you will take it any kind of way, spiral-bound or stapled, in a sleeve.  I mean, it’s just, people, yes, they still do that.  And that’s not the kind of things that libraries are going to collect.  And then, of course, with eBooks it’s even more difficult because if they’re not on your vendor platform –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – there’s a good chance you won’t be able to add them at all.

Sarah:  So even if you, even, even if you want to add them, you can’t because of all of these different restrictions.

Robin:  Yes.  It’s possible that you can’t.  Now there’s, there, people are changing their collection development policies, which is good.

Sarah:  Yes.

Robin:  And for eBooks, there’s a thing called Library SELF-e in which, if you have this in your system – which we’re getting it, and I’m so excited – you can accept materials, digital books from the public, and they go through Library Journal somehow.  I’m not exactly sure on how it works, but they can be made available for your public to check out, which is fantastic!

Sarah:  So I could take my self-published novella and put it in Library SELF-e, and then the eBook would be available to whomever wanted to add it to their collection.

Robin:  Yes.  I’m not sure.  They have different modules.  Like, they have romance, science fiction –

Sarah:  Right.

Robin:  – you know, blah-blah-blah.  They also have regional modules, so I’m not sure if it would be in, like, your regional area or if you could make it available to the entire country, but yes.  Essentially –

Sarah:  Wow.

Robin:  – it would be made available to libraries, and that’s fantastic.

Sarah:  That sounds awesome!  That sounds very cool.

Robin:  Yep!  So that’s, that’s making it easier, but still a lot of librarians have this very visceral, antagonistic attitude towards self-published books, and that has to change, because as you said, a lot of diverse authors just aren’t getting picked up by traditional publishers.  It has nothing to do with the quality of their work –

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  – and everything to do with how traditional publishers think about diverse books, diverse audiences, who’s going to buy it, can it, is it sellable?  That’s what it has to do with.

Sarah:  I’ve spoken to a lot of readers in the last few weeks, ‘cause I’m doing more reader interviews, and I’m, I just finished editing a podcast with a reader I met at RT named Lia, who has a, her own book, book blog called Lia’s Bookish Obsession, and she began her book blog because of what may be the worst librarian story I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard many?

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And it seems to me that there are a couple of different perspectives that come out of librarians, and I’m wondering if I’m wrong about this, that in, in some cases the librarians think that their job is to make sure the public has access to what it should have access to, and that established channels are the preferred main way of making sure that their patrons have what they should be having, not necessarily what they want to be having.  And then there are librarians who are like, no, if the public wants it, that’s what they should have, because that’s what we do and that’s our job.  And I’ve seen sort of both in operation.  This particular reader has a librarian on her husband’s military base who when she tries to check out a book will take the book and check it out and then not give it to her and put something else in the bag because she doesn’t think that this reader should be reading that book.

Robin:  Oh, my gosh!

Sarah:  Seriously, this is the worst librarian story I’ve ever heard.  Like, it happened over and over, and then she told this girl to her face, no, you shouldn’t be reading YA because it’s not for you.

Robin:  [Laughs] Oh, my God!  There should be a librarian horror story podcast, because that –

Sarah:  Oh, my God, yes!  I would love that!  Do you have one?  Because I would love to hear it.  Because I have met – it’s, it’s like independent booksellers.  You know, on one hand, I have met some independent booksellers who are brilliant, brilliant people who have that magical skill of matching a person with a book that they otherwise would never have heard of that’s going to completely rock their world?  And then there’s –

Robin:  Right!

Sarah:  – the independent bookstores who are like, oh, I don’t sell that smut, and I don’t sell it here, and I can’t believe you’re even speaking the words in my store.  How about some-, something else that’s in trade and not what you want?  And the same thing, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve met librarians who are like, oh, my God, romance!  This is the best!  My patrons love it!  We have cataloged everything.  I can’t get enough of it!  And then there’s people who are like, yeah, we just put it on a rack, and we really don’t care.

Robin:  Oh, my gosh.  Yeah, so when I started in 2001, we were the rack people.  We were – [laughs] – you know, not cataloging it, it’s all the same thing, blah blah-blah blah-blah, and so I’m, like, the Genre Avenger, I guess, and I just go around –

[Laughter]

Robin:  – from library to library forcing people to have genre books in the collection the same as any other books in the collection with the same rights and responsibilities and cataloging records and just, it, it really, it really annoys me.  Like, people – and it’s gotten so much better.  I should say that, like, right off the bat.  It’s gotten so much better as younger librarians have come into the field and are like, why would you not catalog this thing?  Why would you just have it out there and no one can find it?  So –

Sarah:  Like, why don’t you want data?  Data is really important!  [Laughs]

Robin:  Exactly!  And, and one of the best things a librarian told me once, and she was an AV Librarian, so of course DVDs get probably the short end of the stick, even after genre fiction, because it’s not even a book!  So it’s like, it’s not your money.  It’s the public’s money –

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  – and you should be buying what the public wants.

Sarah:  Yes.

Robin:  And they’re not mutually exclusive!  The things that you may think people should be reading – I think everybody on earth should read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which comes out in September, so here’s another case where it’s, you know, a few months in advance, but just because I think everybody should read it doesn’t mean it’s not a good book.  I mean, it’s not, they’re not mutually exclusive!  People think everyone should read Jane Austen, and I think even those lib-, librarians and booksellers who, you know, will pooh-pooh romance will tell you to read Jane Austen!

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  It’s not mutually exclusive, and once you accept that, it should be easy to jump to, just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not good for the library.  I mean, I don’t even understand how you would not put someone’s chosen book into their hand.

Sarah:  And yet it does happen.

Robin:  It’s – I’ve never seen it that bad.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  I’ve never seen someone actually say, no, you’re not going to read this.  You’re going to read – I’ve never seen that.  Not even with, with juvenile librarians, and they kind of get a bad rap for, you know, not checking out adult books to children or whatever their policy is, but –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – I’ve never seen that happen.  That’s horrible.

Sarah:  Isn’t it terr-, and I, I have my, in my notes, in my show notes I have it listed as the worst librarian story I have ever heard.

Robin:  I have, you know, from other librarians, I’ve gone to check things out – this was before we had the self-check machines and I could do it myself – and had librarians – or library staff; they’re not all librarians with MLS degrees at the circ desk – and had them, you know, mock my reading tastes –

Sarah:  [Gasps]

Robin:  – or choices.  Oh, yeah, all the time.  They don’t think anything of it.  Like, ha-ha, look at what you’re reading!

Sarah:  No.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  It’s the same with the independent bookseller.  Anyone who shames reader tastes, like, it just, I, I, I want to put on high heels and, and get really mad and stomp around.  [Laughs]  And yell.

Robin:  Yeah, it’s, it’s ridiculous!  It’s ridic-

Sarah:  I want to make myself four inches taller and a lot more loud.  [Laughs]

Robin:  And you think, you wonder why people stop coming to you and asking you for things or asking you for help.  It’s because you’re judging them, and they don’t like it!  Imagine that!

Sarah:  No!

Robin:  Ah, it’s crazy!

Sarah:  It is.  Now, you are also this year’s RWA Librarian of the Year.  Yay!  Congratulations!

Robin:  Wheeee!  [Laughs] Thank you!

Sarah:  Did you, are you excited?

Robin:  I am super excited.  I am super excited, and it’s still, I, I don’t know that it’s still properly sunk in yet.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  I, I, I think I’m still back to that Sunday when I got the call, and I think that my, I was silent for a full two minutes.  I just, it’s unbelievable to me.  I am so excited!

Sarah:  Well, you totally deserve it, dude.  You’re the Genre Avenger!

Robin:  [Laughs] There must be a T-shirt!

Sarah:  There better be a T-shirt!  I mean I, I have one that was inspired by a librarian’s blog post, and it says, I’m the motherfucking librarian, motherfucker, and –

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – whenever I sell that I give the proceeds to the ALA, and it seems to be very popular among librarians.

Robin:  We feel like that a lot, actually.

Sarah:  Well, there’s also a lot of pre-judgment and assumptions about your profession?

Robin:  Yes!

Sarah:  [Laughs] Everyone assumes they know what you do, except they know nothing about what you do.

Robin:  Well, you know, they were in a library once in 1976 –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Robin:  – and this is what my dad still says:  you guys don’t do anything; you just sit there.  And I’m like, okay.

Sarah:  Ohhh, honey.

Robin:  [Laughs] He says, he says it so often now that I can just shake my head at him and say, okay!

Sarah:  Sure, Dad.  Now I remember, I went to ALA in New Orleans a couple of years ago, and it, it blew my mind.  First of all, I played librarian hair color bingo with myself?

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Which was so fun.  I had to, every single day, find somebody with every single possible color on, like, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and brown of, of, and, and purple was, like, first of the day, boom, purple was done, then red, then green, no problem.  So after I played librarian hair, hair color bingo I went to the, like, one of the general assembly meetings, and this was right after – but FEMA had basically upgraded libraries and said, they need to be up and running as soon as possible after a, after a disaster, because when there’s a disaster and all, all, all the things are broken, people go to the library, and the library needs to be up among the very first things.

Robin:  Yep!

Sarah:  Which makes sense, having now lived through several different disasters in several different places.  When there, when, when there was a blackout and there was no power, everyone went to the library, ‘cause they had generators from the city, and when, after Hurricane Sandy, every-, except for the libraries that were carried out to sea, everyone went out to, went to the library.  And I don’t think people realize that when, when, when things go really, really bad, you go to the library, ‘cause –

Robin:  It’s that, it’s that touchstone that you don’t realize it until you need it.

Sarah:  And then it’s like, oh, my gosh, it’s there.  And there’s, and there’s Wi-Fi.

Robin:  It’s, it’s the place where no one’s charging you for anything.  It’s not a commercial enterprise.  You can come and sit; we’re not going to make you buy a drink for – I mean, it’s, it’s just that –

Sarah:  It’s already paid for.

Robin:  – that place that everyone can come and, you know, be welcomed.

Sarah:  Yep!  Which is a pretty powerful thing in our society, because those places are becoming fewer and fewer, far between and hard to find.

Robin:  Yes!  Yes!

Sarah:  So the other thing I remember, right after they were talking about FEMA and disaster, right after that, they were discussing the fact that many, many librarians are white, and there is a lack of librarians of colors and lack of librarians from marginalized communities, and I, and it was one of those things where until it was pointed out to me, I hadn’t realized it.  ‘Cause I was too busy looking at all the hair color.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  There’s plenty of diversity in the hair color; the hair color is taken care of.  But – and I have to say, that I love the, the idea that as women are aging and are, and we lose our hair color, that gray hair takes dye so well that you get older, and then you get, like, you get, you get plumage.  Like, you get legit purple and red plumage, and I’m like, this is going to be so great!  Let’s go with gray; it’s going to be awesome!  Screw brown; I’m going orange!  It’s going to be great!  And I love it!

Robin:  [Laughs] I can live out my hair dreams!

Sarah:  That’s right!  Exactly!  I don’t have to bleach it first, ‘cause it’s already gone!  But I realized that it is a very white profession.

Robin:  Yes, it is.

Sarah:  And it still is!

Robin:  It, it’s kind of like publishing in that way, actually.  It’s, it –

Sarah:  The devil you say!

[Laughter]

Robin:  Majority female, majority white.  There, it’s, it –

Sarah:  Yeah!

Robin:  Yeah!  It’s very much like publishing, and it’s very – huh, let’s see, it’s very interesting that we note it, but we don’t change it.

Sarah:  Are you still often the only person of color in the room?

Robin:  Um –

Sarah:  Or is that happening less and less?

Robin:  It depends on where I am.  So, at my job, my boss is black, so if we’re in a meeting I’m never the – [laughs] – only person of color in the room.  But that is unusual.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Robin:  That’s unusual in libraries, and it’s especially unusual in Collection Development, and I was telling her the other day, of Collection Development Librarians, I can think of about four who are not white.

Sarah:  Wow.

Robin:  And that, it, it’s really – I hadn’t thought of it before, but now I think about it a lot because if you think, you’re the gatekeeper to the collection for a large amount of people, and it’s not that people are doing it with malice, but if –

Sarah:  No, it’s just –

Robin:  – but if we –

Sarah:  – you do what you’ve always done, and you get what you’ve always gotten.

Robin:  Exactly.  And if you don’t even think about diverse books, or you’re thinking about them as a, they need diverse books, instead of a, we all need diverse books, that really can influence how your collection looks.

Sarah:  Just a little bit.

Robin:  So it’s, you know, I had someone the other day say to me – I was buying Lemonade, which is delicious, and also Beyoncé’s new CD.

Sarah:  You know, I, I’ve been wondering, like, I know she mentioned Red Lobster, and Red Lobster was like, oh, my God, we cannot find a table!  And I’m wondering if, like, Country Time Lemonade is, like, right here, here we are.  We are here for you, Beyoncé.  Just, just –

Robin:  [Laughs] Yes!  Finally, someone recognizes us!

[Laughter]

Robin:  The lemon industry is booming!

Sarah:  Hell, yes, Beyoncé!

Robin:  But I had someone say to me the other day, ‘cause we’re a, we’re a big system, but we don’t buy a lot of copies of things because a lot of our libraries are really small, so I started out with eight copies of Lemonade, and someone said to me, well, you know they’re all going to get stolen.

Sarah:  [Gasps!]

Robin:  And I was like, yeah, like all of our WWE videos get stolen and the copies of ER’s fourth season that I just had to re-buy in January, and now they’re all gone.  I mean, yeah, things get stolen.  All of our Wicca books will get stolen.  What are you trying to say?  Yeah, we buy things, and they get stolen, and that’s what happens here.  We don’t have materials security right now.  Things get stolen, and it’s not just things that are of interest to black people.

Sarah:  Ohhh.  Yeah.  I wonder if that was news to him.

Robin:  You know, maybe.  Try to find a Beatles CD.  Try to find a Neil Diamond CD.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Robin:  I mean, these are the things that I’ve had to re-buy.  James Taylor.

Sarah:  Neil, Neil Diamond and James Taylor fans are the worst, right?!

Robin:  They are the worst!

Sarah:  Neil Diamond fans are terrible!  [Laughs]

Robin:  So I mean, things just happen to stuff, and to try to pin –

Sarah:  It has nothing to do with who it is.

Robin:  – pin it on, you know, Beyoncé fans is kind of ridiculous!

Sarah:  Oh, lord.

Robin:  So, it’s that kind of thing that you hear every day in some form or fashion of microagressions to the extreme.  So that’s kind of, you know, instead of not being the only person in the room, it’s the having to shrug off comments like that all the time.

Sarah:  That sucks.  Out loud.  Sideways.

Robin:  And the whole thing of, you’re not like the others.  Because –

Sarah:  Oh!

Robin:  – even in libraries, we still have a lot of white man’s burden – I guess it would be white woman’s burden in libraries – where we’re here to, you know, help them.  We’re here to, you know, be a, a shining beacon of goodness for them, and it’s like, nah.  I’m, I’m kind of over that, so yeah.

Sarah:  There is, and, and there is a lot to, to unpack in the public perception of libraries as, like you said, it is always open, they don’t make you buy something, you’re, everyone is welcome, and everyone can go there, and there’re so many, not only are there assumptions about librarians, but there are assumptions about who uses libraries and why they use libraries?

Robin:  Yes.

Sarah:  And, and just having to deal with that from, from the public is one thing, because I, I know, having seen it in many different towns, the, what do you mean, the library needs more money?  How could you possibly need more money?  You’re raising my taxes so you can buy books that I don’t think people should be reading – I love that part.

Robin:  Yes!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Citizen, citizen opinion hour at the tax meeting is always just, like, when it has to do with libraries, it just makes me want to start throwing chairs, which is probably why I stole all those WWE videos, because I needed –

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – to practice my chair throwing?  That’s what I needed them for.  I will confess to you, I, when I was a teenager, I did steal a romance novel from the library, and then, like, fifteen years later I put it back, but they no longer had them uncataloged in the spinny racks anymore, so I had to just stick it somewhere, and I’m sure that librarian came across this very florid, fuchsia, teal book with, like, bosoms and ravens and, and impossibly curly hair, like, stuck in the fiction, or stuck in the nonfiction cookbooks and was like, what the hell happened?

[Laughter]

Sarah:  But yes, that was me; I stole it ‘cause I was never, I was too afraid to check it out, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be allowed to, so I’m sorry.  I did not, however –

Robin:  Aww!

Sarah:  – I did not steal a Neil Diamond.

Robin:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  But I, I, I can both believe it and not believe it that there’s all that microagressions and assumption within librarians as the, the publishing – or publishing, heh-heh – the professional world of librarians as well.  I’m, I’m, like, horrified and still not surprised.

Robin:  Well, and one of the things that I have started saying recently in regards to diverse books is the, the, the thinking has been, we need diverse books for our diverse communities, and –

Sarah:  No!

Robin:  – that was a, that was a good place to start.  I kind of compare that to the gay marriage argument.  Like, we need civil unions because they deserve to have – okay, that’s a good place to start, but at some point we have to get to, we’re all equal.  It’s all marriage; we don’t need civil unions; we need marriage for everybody.

Sarah:  Yep.

Robin:  We don’t need diverse books for diverse communities; we need diverse books for everybody.  Everybody gains from reading books about someone different than themselves.

Sarah:  Yep.  You are now in charge of everything.  What are you going to change?

Robin:  [Laughs] I’m going to give more books better visibility.  That’s what I’m going to change.  And not just books, actually.  I guess across the board, more art, better visibility, so that people get out of the habit of thinking that it’s just one way.  It’s, you know, and it’s not, it’s not just white people who think that.  It’s everybody who thinks that, because we all share the same entertainment.  We all share the same art, and we’re all seeing the same things, and it, I guess one of the best ways to combat that is to start looking in other places and looking for other things, trying to diversify what you’re seeing, because if you just leave it on network TV you’re going to see black people maybe three times a week, maybe Asians sometimes, maybe Latin sometimes, never the person who’s black and Asian.  I mean, you’re just not seeing the world.  You’re just not seeing the world.  You’re seeing a tiny sliver of what is out there.  It’s, it’s so funny because you would watch Friends.  I was in New York last week.  It don’t look like Friends.  And so we’re all kind of captive to this, and it’s up to us to change it, because it doesn’t look like the conglomerates that give us a majority of our entertainment are willing to do that.  Twitter has helped a lot.  Learning other authors and listening to authors talk about even more authors, and, you know, so many recommendations I get just from listening to Twitter authors talk to each other.

Sarah:  I always love the idea that Twitter doesn’t sell books.  Twitter does not sell books in massive numbers.  Like, Twitter isn’t going to sell fifty thousand copies of a book.  Like, Twitter can’t do that, but Twitter can increase the visibility of a book exponentially with very little effort if you’ve connected it to the right people.

Robin:  Yes!  Exactly.

Sarah:  The idea of what a, a book that is selling means varies from place to place, so I know that there are many people who say, oh, it’s not worth it to promote on Twitter ‘cause Twitter doesn’t sell books, yet I buy books because I heard about them on Twitter, like, every day.

Robin:  Right!

Sarah:  Every single day.

Robin:  Right, or I’ll go look, look at an author or, you know, I’ll go and just do more research based on what I’ve heard people say about them on Twitter.  That can be good and bad, however.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, yes, that can also work against you.

Robin:  Yeah!  ‘Cause I have heard, you know, of author misbehaving on, on different social media and then gone to look and see what kind of things they’re writing.  I mean, so it can be good and bad.  I should say this:  that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t buy your book for the library.

Sarah:  Oh, no, of course not!

Robin:  You can misbehave almost all that you want.  If someone, if I think someone in my library wants to read your book, I will buy it.  I bought the silly Thomas Jefferson loves Sally Hemings, and I wanted to dropkick it into the next universe because, no, there, there is no love there.  It’s a fiduciary relationship whereas he owns her.  We, we really –

Sarah:  She cannot say no; there is no consent.

Robin:  Ex-, exactly.  There’s no consent.  That doesn’t mean that I won’t buy it for the library, because people need to be able to make that decision for themselves, and I, usually if I hate something, it’s, I’m more likely to buy it.

Sarah:  Wow!  Really!

Robin:  Yes!  Because it’s not about me.  It’s not about me.  And once you start down that slippery slope of not buying things that you don’t like, there’s no good, there, that doesn’t end any good way.

Sarah:  No, it’s, it’s your job not to curate based on what you think people should have access to, but what they will want to have access to.

Robin:  And how I feel about it personally has no place in the purchasing for a large amount of people.  There’s no place for that in Collection Development.

Sarah:  One last question for you:

Robin:  Sure!

Sarah:  What are the books that you want to tell everyone about, and it does not matter if they aren’t out yet?  I want to know what books you’re just like, oh, my gosh!  I cannot wait to talk about this book with people!  What are you excited about?

Robin:  [Laughs] Oh, gosh, let’s see.  I already mentioned Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.  I actually think that book should be required reading for everyone in our country.  It is amazing; it is really that good.  And everyone will be talking about it when it comes out, and you’ll hear so much about it that you’ll think, it can’t be that good.  It’s better than that.  It’s amazing.  It’s amazing.  That’s one of those life-changing books that you’re, you’re going to believe, I, I can’t just believe I read that.  That was, it’s that amazing.  I can’t shut up about that book.  It’s about a slave who runs away from, mm, I think Georgia, and her travels to get to freedom, and even when you think you’re free, you’re not free, and, and the slave catcher who is chasing her.  It’s amazing.

There’re a lot of books in series that I’m excited about.  Like, I’m always excited about a new Melissa Blue book.  Right now she’s writing about geeks in her geek series, and I absolutely love these books.  I love the ones about the Scots, too, but it’s, right now she can do nothing wrong.  I, I love all of her books.  Same with Tasha Harrison who writes, I think it’s erotic, I think you’d call it erotic romance, set in Philadelphia.  Fantastic!  Fantastic series, the Lust, Lust Diaries.  HelenKay Dimon.  I just read her Mr. and Mr. Smith, which was really good, and she says the next book in that series is coming, I think she said June or maybe September –

Sarah:  Yay!

Robin:  – and also her Greenway, Greenway Range series, which I absolutely love.  I just finished Jessica Scott’s Break My Fall, and oh, my God.

Sarah:  Yeah?

Robin:  [Laughs] That book was amazing too!

Sarah:  Really!

Robin:  So these are the – yeah, it was really, it’s hard.  It’s, it’s so funny about romance.  Every time I talk to my sister about it she mentions, sometimes I like light books, and I’m like, they’re not all light.  I mean, romance has changed.

Sarah:  Oh, just a little.

Robin:  So much.  And if you, if you think that all these books are light and fluffy and Hallmark equivalents, you will be so surprised when you read something like Break My Fall.  That is a dark book.  That is a dark book, but it, I mean it has a Happily Ever After at the end, so it’s fantastic, but if you go into it thinking it’s going to be an easy, light, fluff read, you will be surprised and probably disappointed if that’s what you want.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s podcast.  I want to thank Robin Bradford for taking the time to talk to me.  I, I’m always  fascinated by how librarian-ing – see, I said it right that time – how it works and how books are put into libraries and what influences the acquisition of a particular library, and I also think it’s super cool that Robin was the Romance Writers of America Librarian of the Year this year.  Congratulations again, Robin.

This podcast was brought to you by Burn Down the Night by M. O’Keefe.  Perfect for fans of Everything I Left Unsaid, this dark, emotional, and dangerously sexy world follows a con woman and a bad-boy biker as their battle for control turns explosive.

The podcast transcript for this episode is brought to you by Happily Ever Afterlives, a two-in-one reissue of sexy Regency paranormal novellas by author Olivia Waite, who says that they are witty and Gothic, not too dark, and they off the chance to learn just how Lucifer feels about violin music.  In Hell and Hellion, Virginia Greening always loved the dash and dazzle of London society, but after being jilted by the man she rescued from Hell, pitying looks and backhanded whispers only leave her feeling left out.  And worse, since her return, she’s started seeing demons lurking in the corner of every proper parlor.  Her soul is off limits to them, but they don’t make for comfortable company.  Things get even more complicated when an incubus asks her to dance, and he’s naked.  You can find Happily Ever Afterlives wherever eBooks are sold.

Our music is provided every week by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries.  This track is called “The Chatham Lassies,” and you can find it on their album Blackhouse, available at Amazon and iTunes and wherever you buy your fine music!

If you are a long-time listener of the podcast you’re going to be very familiar with the next twenty or thirty words I’m going to say, but thank you for listening to them anyway!  We have a podcast Patreon.  Every month, awesome people make a monthly pledge to help the podcast become more gooder and excellent and awesomer.  Starting at a dollar a month, you can help me reach goals like commissioning transcripts, and you can find out all the cool rewards at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.

If you would like to talk to me, you have ideas or suggestions, you can email me at [email protected], or you can call and leave a message at 1-201-371-3272.  Tell us what book made you a romance reader, because I’m still taking your calls and they’re still awesome.  Or you can call and leave me a message about something else you want to talk about.  I am totally open to your calls, ‘cause you’re all excellent human beings!

And on behalf of Robin and myself and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[sweet music]