Imagine that libraries didn't exist, and were invented tomorrow. People would flock to them! The challenge we face is to convey to people what we really do, rather than what they think we do, and to tell them how we fit into their lives and can help them get from A to B a little better. Marketing is the dialogue between us and the rest of the world which ensures our existing users continue to come back, and our potential users sign up for a membership card. Not everyone will find the library useful – but if we reach all of those who do, w'll never have to worry about our future again.

The idea of this book is to give you a toolkit of marketing ideas that will inspire you to act in your own library. In my ideal scenario, you came into this believing that marketing the library was probably a good idea, yo're leaving convinced that it is essential, but most importantly you feel you have the knowledge to take a marketing project forward and do it well. I imagine most people will have dipped into this rather than read it from cover to cover, so I won't summarize the previous couple of hundred pages here; I want to use this space to say ‘marketing isn't so hard, so be bold and have some fun’. If you want to ask any questions about the things in this text, or you just want to talk to someone else who feels passionate about marketing libraries, you can find me on the book's Twitter account: @libmarketing.

The skillsets of the modern information professional and the modern marketer aren't so far apart, when all is said and done. Being a librarian has always been about finding the right information, for the right people, at the right time. Marketing a library is really just promoting the right benefits of that information, to the right people, at the right time – taking the useful and neces sary services we provide, and making those who need them aware of them.

Take action while this is all fresh in your mind, and do some real marketing.