I received a sweet email from a fan of my novels.

“Hi Hope.  I just wanted to thank you again for your newsletter and to let you know I requested Murder in Craven at the Vancouver, WA library. I have a goal to read forty books this year and am hoping to add the Craven series to the list. Money is tight right now, so I try to add books from local authors to my library’s collection.”

What a wonderful gesture! Authors ask their fans to buy their books all the time, but do they ask them to order the books via the library? Because if the book is not on the library shelf, and someone asks, there’s a chance the book will be purchased and stocked. And if the book is part of a series, even better.

A library buys a title once for it to be read free by dozens of readers. To some authors, that means dozens of readers not buying the book. While that is partly the case, those readers just might buy other books in the series, or buy another book outside the series, tell their book club about the book they read from the library, or tell enough people that there is a waiting list for the book, making the library order more copies, or people on the waiting list to buy it in lieu of the wait.

Putting your book in a local library, wherever it happens to be, earns more readers. It also earns more paid readers than you had before, even if the initial reader read it for free.

Don’t discount a library. I was seated in my grandsons’ Ju Jitsu class a few weeks ago, and an elderly gentleman asked if I was C. Hope Clark. I said yes. He said he was number 11 on the library waiting list for my latest book.

Yeah, an author can float on that for a few days, don’t you think? That’s at least a dozen readers reading my book, with most of them telling at least one other person about the book, and possibly mentioning the author.