Dallas bookstore is selling the world on classic novels with clickbait headlines
Not everyone will pick up a book, but everyone will click on an internet headline they find interesting.
"British guy dies after selfie gone wrong"? Of course we would click. We need to make sure to not repeat that poor guy's mistake.
"German doctor becomes first to perform full body transplant"? What does full body transplant even mean? Click.
All of these headlines were written by The Wild Detectives, but they are not a fresh digital news source you should be bookmarking. They are, actually, a bookstore.
Last fall, the bookstore started an ingenious internet campaign to interest as many people as possible in classic literary novels by using "litbait." They crafted intriguing clickbait headlines that, when clicked, would bring you to the entire text of the novel.
At the very top of each post, they would write, "You fell for the bait, now fall for the book."
To explain the litbait campaign and its effects, they created an informative video. According to the video, the bookstore's site traffic increased by 14,000 percent while engagements on their Facebook posts also went up by 150 percent.
Moral of this story is that there may still be hope for encouraging future generations to read. All we have to do is wrap the stories in sensational headlines.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
BONUS: See if you can guess what novels the above headlines are alluding to. Find the answers at The Wild Detective's Medium page.
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Christine is a Web Culture Intern at Mashable. She has previously written for FanSided and Saturday Down South. She has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from Hunter College. Before she started writing, she worked in education as a teacher and school leader for four years. Her special talents include being able to quote The Office on command, playing non-stop Overwatch for hours, and composing only the wittiest of Tweets (her own opinion).
