Framing information: seeing/finding problems, curating information, asking questions. SO important in our day of information overload. And especially applicable to reading! A few useful frames: Experience frame (try suggesting a book in terms of the experience you have when reading it. As in, WOW! This book gave me the shivers the whole time, and even though it was so haunting and horrifying I couldn't put it down! One of the great joys of reading is the experience of it, and playing that up will attract people to reading), and the Label frame (positive/negative labels affect behavior; don't ever label someone as a "non-reader". This can have a HUGE effect on their reading!).
"Clarity on how to think without clarity on how to act can leave people unmoved." (142) Sell that book/reading all you want, but make sure you have the goods (books) right there to put into their hands. Take kids to bookstores. Or the library. Go.
Section 3
"How to Do". Here, I handpicked a few of the ideas that I think had the most application to selling reading.
Pitch: a Rhyming pitch works well because of how our brains work (Helpful when learning how to read or learning reading strategies. Makes it more fun too). A Subject Line pitch should (according to research) "be either obviously useful or mysteriously intriguing, but probably not both" (167). I can think of any number of books that I read based on recommendations that made the book seem imminently useful, or mysteriously intriguing. So when trying to push a book on someone, that might come in handy to remember.
Serve: "We do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person" (212). This reminds me that ultimately, I want someone's life to be better because of something that they read. That's one of the best things about reading, right? To come away a better, changed person? So rather than think of literacy and reading as a do-or-die skill (which really, it is), maybe we would be able to sell someone on reading or on a particular book if we remember, and emphasize, that they will be better off having that powerful, wonderful experience of reading.
Have you read this book yet? What did you think?
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