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<\/a>Teen section signs in the background and adorable couple holding hands in the foreground at a January 2017 event with authors Susan Dennard and Alexandra Duncan.<\/p><\/div> Rethinking section signage for different age groups in the bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI ranted a bit about the overuse, or perhaps misuse, of the term “young adult” in\u00a0this blog post<\/a> from the now defunct Book Witches blog. Basically, I take issue with the fact that “young adult” refers to actual, albeit young, adults in almost every context outside of book marketing\u2014not 14-year-olds and certainly not 12-year-olds. This understandably leads to confusion among customers. Many eventually decide that “young adult” really just means “older kids.” Recently a customer described the title she was looking for this way: “It’s not a picture book, so it must be… young adult, I guess.” Yikes! There’s so much in between those categories, but I guess nothing that easily comes to mind for a lot of customers.
\n<\/a>I’m always looking for a better, more accurate, and clearer way to say what I mean. That’s especially important in signage, which exists to help people navigate a space to find what they want or need. If the words we put on signage are meaningful only to us, and not to the general public, then it isn’t very successful.\u00a0To quote Ben Gibbard: “The boundaries of language I quietly cursed \/\u00a0And all the different names for the same thing.”
\nI’d love to hear from fellow booksellers with examples\u00a0of re-thinking your signage to make it more useful and effective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"