Books make great gifts

Every year I buy books (or bookstore gift cards) for the majority of the people on my holiday shopping list, so the message in this marketing campaign isn't new to me.



My hero and favorite YA author, Judy Blume, was featured in this video. She said, "Books make great gifts because you can never have too many." I think I liked her clip the best.

If I were cool enough to be a published novelist and be featured in this video, I would have said, "Books make great gifts because they will never be replaced with newer technology." Books are probably the only source of entertainment in our culture that isn't affected by new breakthroughs in technology. I can buy a 100-year-old book and it still works just fine, but I can't buy a 50-year-old album or a 20-year-old movie (or even a 10-year-old computer game) unless I have the right technology to play it.

Free books or VHS, anyone?

One of my fellow freelancers, Jessica Mousseau of JM Writing, is giving away books and VHS that she doesn't want anymore. All you need to do is cover the cost of shipping.

If I weren't perpetually in the process of culling my own book collection, I'd take her up on it. You just can't beat free books!

As it is, though, I've run out of even overflow space: My books reside not only on bookshelves, but also boxes in storage and in stacks on the floor in front of said bookshelves. The library has become my best friend, not only because it's free, but also because I just don't have any more room for books I'll only read once.

Borrow books at your own risk

I've mentioned before how anal I am about my books, and I've posted several times on books in my collection. Now the blogger who started the "Weird Book Habits" discussion, Debbie Ridpath Ohi of Inkygirl, has created a comic that pretty much sums it all up for me.

Mark Twain wrote in Pudd'nhead Wilson, "The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money."

Personally, I think it should have said, "if not asked to lend books."

Literature Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing

The Nobel Prize for Literature was just awarded to Doris Lessing. I hadn't heard of her before, but I've already requested a couple of her books from the library: The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, both mentioned in the article.

I have quite a backlog of books to read right now, but probably in about a month or so you should see these books pop up on my book blog, Livre du Jour.

Be sure to read and/or listen to the NPR story on Doris Lessing and the Nobel Prize — it is quite interesting!

What makes a bestseller?

Please scroll down for important corrections on the original post.

NPR had an interesting headline yesterday about what it means to be a bestseller. Although when you pull up the page it displays an article about the reader gender gap, do listen to the radio spot — it's quite interesting.

One of the things the radio spot discusses is the New York Times's recent decision to expand their bestseller lists, basically so more books could achieve that all-important label. It also discusses the rather arbitrary means of deciding which books have achieved bestseller status.

This reminds me of something that was big on WritersWeekly.com a couple of years ago: Amazon.com was running a bestseller program, where authors would sign up, pay Amazon.com (see below for corrections) somewhere in the range of two grand, and they would run a special where — for one weekend — your book would be featured with some freebie giveaway. The idea was to get your book to sell lots and lots of copies in a 24-hour time frame, and therefore "become" a bestseller. No matter if it never achieved the same sales rate — as long as it got there once, authors could claim they had an Amazon.com bestseller.

Obviously, Angela Hoy didn't have much good to say about that. It's a clear-cut case of working the system, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the true rate of sales of the book. Angela also didn't have very nice things to say about taking advantage of writers that way. (Two grand? Good grief!!!)

The current story — the New York Times adding another bestseller list to increase the number of books that make it to bestseller status — reminds me a lot of that. Definitely some working of the system going on here. Another book I read once (the title of which I can't remember now) talked about how even the NYT list is worked: The titles are chosen ahead of time by the paper, which then sends a list out to the booksellers to confirm or deny. Well, of course they always confirm those titles, because those are the ones whose sales they are suddenly paying attention to!

To come full circle, I think NPR's radio spot on what makes a bestseller — while it doesn't discuss the NYT's hand in determining what titles make the list — does accurately represent the mystery of what, exactly, defines a bestseller.

Corrections:

Thanks to fellow freelancer Kathy Kehrli, I was motivated to check the WritersWeekly.com article after I wrote the above post, and discovered that I was wrong on my facts.

1) Amazon.com was not directly involved in this marketing scam. The scam itself is marketed via a teleseminar.

2) However, Amazon.com sets themselves up for this by calculating the bestseller list every hour. I think all of us agree that a book needs to sell consistently well over more than an hour's time in order to be considered a bestseller. Unfortunately, Amazon.com's system allows books to get on the list due to nothing more than an hour's unusually high sales.

3) The scam's time frame is an hour, not a weekend or a day as I had said in the post.

You can see the original WritersWeekly.com article here.

This little incident is a good lesson to me as to why I should check my facts before I post, rather than writing on something based on memory — especially a two-year-old memory.