Archive for the ‘book thoughts’ Category
(insert theme music from Brazil here)
(In which I present another possibility for the future of the physical book, because I felt there just wasn’t enough talk about the whole thing.)
Friday and Saturday, the stars aligned and I had—wait for it—two days off in a row. I know! It was heavenly! And on the second day, I made a trip to the farmers’ market and read (the Contract With God trilogy, fantastic) in the park. Beautiful day, yummy apples, great book.
And then my phone said, “doodle doodle doo.” I looked at it, of course. 2 new emails, neither important, and about 80 tweets in the last hour from people I follow. Started reading them, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Maybe I should check my blog reader, I thought. Then I thought, what the hell is wrong with me? I’m outside on a great day reading a great book and I’m feeling obligated to keep up with the 140-character thoughts of over 200 people? No offense to the folks I follow on Twitter, all of whom are incredibly fascinating, of course, I just couldn’t believe the extent to which I was freaked out about “missing something” on a Saturday morning. Same thing with email. I’ve always been a habitual email refresher, and my phone just aids & abets. It sits in my purse and whenever it makes a little noise, I excuse myself from whatever I’m doing, and check what is, half the time, an advertisement.
So I took the day off from the internet on Saturday. I put my phone away and disabled my internet access and just…had a day. Read some more, cleaned, watched Adam’s Rib and began to wonder if in fact Katherine Hepburn is secretly my great-aunt or something. Invented the umpteenth variation on my basic couscous recipe. It wasn’t the perfect day, but it was nice. And a piece of that was disengaging from the ever-present Internet on purpose. The more of the day I spent not with the Internet, the more I spent not giving a shit about it. So what if another #amazonfail was happening? I was reading, don’t bother me.
This experiment wasn’t perfect; for example, my inattention to the phone for 12 hours caused family members to worry and even call the store to see what was going on. (In future, I will be sure to announce my days off so nobody worries that I am dead.) But I will definitely do it again.
Of course, even on my days off I can’t stop thinking about <serious voice> THE FUTURE OF THE PRINTED BOOK </serious voice>. So I was wondering at the end of my disconnected day, could this be a future trend, people taking the day off from connectivity? I think we all know the stress that comes from being too plugged-in. I’m feeling it, and I’m a member of the connected generation, the generation with thumb calluses from texting, the generation that feels in emoticons, the generation with ethernet cables for veins. Despite my well-documented enthusiam for technology, some days I feel like checking email and Twitter and blogs any time after 10am is like trying to merge onto I-95 at 75 mph without slowing down. I can imagine a near future where people say, “hey, just so you know, Friday I’m disconnecting for the day.” And that’s that.
And what will people do on the days they choose to disconnect? Probably the same things I did. Watch a movie, clean the house, make couscous, and maybe even…read a book! A real book. Not connected to anything! With paper and glue and even that o-so-worshiped book smell that is everybody’s first reason to defend physical books. I still think e-books will be part of the future and that as booksellers we need to understand them, but I also think e-books and physical books will come to serve different purposes in our lives, different delivery for different types of content.
To that end, I think an important part of the physical book’s future will be a refuge from the always-on, always-running digital culture. I love digital culture, I’m happy to be a part of it—I love connecting with people I wouldn’t know otherwise, I love how quickly we’re beginning to come up with ideas, I love the sheer number of new things I learn everyday (even if it’s making my TBR pile more unwieldy than usual). But it can wear me down. I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I bet books will be a place to which we turn to stop and breathe and enjoy the feeling of devoting all our attention to just one person telling us one story at a time.
Get back to where you once belonged
Comments(4)A small conversation on Twitter sparked this question: what books are now out of print that you would sell the hell out of if they were still in print?
I’ll start with three of mine. They’re all kids’ books, I’m guessing in part because I’m too young to have loved grown-up books that are now OP, and in part because it’s the books I grew up with that really imprinted themselves on me and follow me around all day.
1. The A. I. Gang trilogy by Bruce Coville (originally published by Minstrel Books, part of S&S). Fantastic work of sci-fi for older middle grade that I was completely obsessed with. I have no idea why this isn’t available anymore, especially because I thought it was a given that Coville rocks, but I’m really glad I still have my copies. Great characters, includes fantastic female characters and characters of color without being tokenist, hilarious, and so, so smart. This is a series that made me seriously think about nuclear war and the stupidity of Mutually Assured Destruction when I was all of, like, 10. Still re-read them everytime I move and have to re-pack them. This series has perhaps the highest badge of honor I can give it: as a kid, I regularly pretended I was one of the characters and/or had extensive daydreams in which I re-wrote myself into the story. I can say that about maybe two other books (The Dark is Rising series and The Egypt Game). I really wish it was still around, I think it would delight fans of The Mysterious Benedict Society and E. L. Konigsberg but would also be great for reluctant readers, male or female.
2. Nobodies and Somebodies by Doris Orgel (originally published by Viking). This book was YA before YA was cool and before I was old enough to know what YA was. Actually, I guess nowadays it would be high MG as well. No matter, it is still great. Story of a girl who moves to a new area and new school and gets caught up in the craziness of the cool and the uncool, but that looks at several points of view rather than walking the well-trod “man, those popular girls sure are bitchy” route. Would love to be able to sell this book again. One character lies about having swum with dolphins to be cool, and the popular girls paint their nails in a really weird way that’s actually impossible, and there’s lots of kicking heels against the heater to protest popular girls even though it disrupts the class pet. This should be re-released as a TPO as MG so I can sell it to tweens who want a more sophisticated read.
3. Ash by Lisa Rowe Fraustino (originally published by Orchard Books). Another book that would still be in print if it had been published after the onset of YA madness. A very real look at what life is like when your sibling is mentally ill and your family is just a normal family. I love this book so much, I can’t count how many times I’ve re-read it. (Full disclosure, I think my mom and she were once in the same writer’s group, but as it happened so long ago that I can’t remember for sure, I doubt it’s influencing my mentioning it here.) In voice, it’s an early King Dork, but telling a totally different story. You know what, I’m going to type out the prologue so you can hear the voice, see if you get drawn into it the way I get every time I read it:
“The Last Will and Testament of Wesley Willian Libby, age 15 (cause you never know when a truck’s gonna hit you)
“Being of sound mind and body, not counting pigeon toes and baby flab, I hereby declare this my 1st and last will and testament so far.
“To my beloved month Bonnie Lynn Tibbetts Libby I leave my Bible. But 1st my best friend Merle R. Daigle’s gotta go through and erase some stuff. Merle, you know what I’m talking about.
“To my beloved father Stefan Edward Libby, known to the rest of creation as Steve, I leave the violin you never wanted to buy me. Sell it and buy the CB you was always after us to pitch in and get you for Christmas. And if you dig deep in my closet you’re gonna find an old G.I. Joe wearing them army medals of yours you LOST a few years ago. Don’t get all mad that I didn’t confess this when I was alive. You woulda killed me.
“To my once-in-a-great-while beloved sister Deena T. Libby, OFFICIALLY known on her birth certificate as Dayna Theresa, which I personally think is a better name, I don’t leave nothing.
“No, just kidding Deena–you get the dust balls under my bed and the snotty handkerchief in my pants pocket when I die.”
“No, no, DEENA, just kidding! You can have my breadbox. Guess I should cross that out and write “CD-radio,” but Mama told me it was a breadbox under the Christmas tree and now that’s what it is. Also, my entire CD collection, except for the Roy Boys Grammy Ethyl give me for my birthdays, and Grammy had better take them back cause Deena would overreact if she had to share her room with Acuff, Rogers, Orbison & Clark.
“To the aforementioned best friend Merle R. Daigle, who’d get embarrassed if I called him beloved so I won’t, I leave my entire comic book collection except for the 1961 Green Honet and the ‘62 Wonder Woman and the ‘65 Superman cause them’s worth money and Mama & Daddy can sell them to pay for my funeral. Better clean out my college account at the Fleet Bank of Maine and use that for the funeral too. Only about $142.67 in there, so don’t get no expensive casket. Cremate me. But that don’t mean to keep my ashes around the house in no sicko urn. Bury them out back next to Togo, or put them in the cemetery with Grampy Libby. Even better, use them to fertilize Millard Worcester’s blueberry field, which’s got sentimental value to me but I can’t say why cause it’s Merle’s secret too.
“Merle also gets the personal effects in my locker if I die during the school year, but DON’T let NOBODY else in the locker, Merle, or I’ll haunt you, I swear.
“To the Calvary Bible Church I leave all my clothes to put in a gar(b)age sale or to give to the homeless cause Mama wouldn’t have the heart to do it herself. Except my Knights of Sisyphus T-shirt—that goes back to Ash. The church can also have my baseball equipment, Scrabble, books and junk so the kids will finally have something to do when the parents are fellowshipping at covered dish suppers.
“To my beloved brother Ashton Allen Libby I leave a composition book with some stuff written in it ONLY for him. Merle, you gotta get it for Ash out of the Shibboleth, and nobody else nag Merle to find out what the Shibboleth is cause that’s just between him & me. Now Merle, don’t get all mad, but the book’s in a secret compartment that YOU don’t know about. Take a hammer and pull up that floorboard with the big knothole, the one you always call Mrs. Fish-Lips’ belly button. Then paw around in there till you find the book, but don’t you dare read it or I’ll haunt you WITH CHAINS, I swear. If it ain’t there, that means I changed my mind and already give Ash the composition book.
“If there’s anything I left out then it ain’t important and Deena can have it.
“Just kidding! I didn’t leave nothing out.”
So, there’s my tribute to some books I wish were still around so I could sell them all over the place. What about you? What books do you try to recommend or sell but they’re out of print? Include the publisher name if you have it, maybe one of these days someone will stumble across this post and try to bring the book back.
Amazonfail
It’s all over these interwebs, and my store has a response! Cutting and pasting the whole thing here, since I was the author and I give myself permission. You should click the link to see the picture of our bestseller list with IndieBound logo hovering above, though.
Over the weekend, you may have heard something about a controversy over recent changes to Amazon’s ranking system that are primarily affecting books with sexual content, and especially books with GLBT content, by removing their rankings and thus impacting their visibility on the site. More information is easy to find, as the internet has basically exploded about the whole thing.
Though it’s not clear yet what’s happened, here at WORD, we wanted to take this opportunity to assure our customers that the problem of books with “adult content” not being ranked is not endemic across the book industry. In the interests of transparency, our bestseller list is calculated as follows:
1. On first day of new month, run sales report for previous month.
2. Type top ten bestselling titles on a list.
3. Print out list on yellow paper.
(Possible glitch: the manager forgets how to count. If this happens, we’ll be the first people to let you know.)
As you can see, it is a simple process and any book can be a part. We invite customers to test this assertion by buying dozens of copies of whichever adult title they like best to drive it to the top of our bestseller list. No one would be more amused than we by an April bestseller list composed of gay erotica and perennial bestseller Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.
This should clarify our position nicely, but if you have any other questions, you are welcome to email us at info@wordbrooklyn.com, call at 718 383 0096 (no extension, no phone tree, and definitely no hold music), or for direct human contact, visit us in person at 126 Franklin Street.
ARCreader; or, ARE YOU LISTENING, SONY?
Quick post to link to advanced.reader’s post suggesting the potential for publishers to help pay for e-readers for booksellers, with the understanding that they would primarily be used for reading ARCs (and thus cutting down on the ARC mountain). She calls it a modest proposal and I think it’s definitely something that should be considered. In fact, in my case, I think it would lead to increased sales–books I really loved I would go out and buy, instead of just keeping the ARC. Lots of pros and cons discussed in the post.
I will definitely second the shout-out to Sony at the end.
Sony, if you’re listening? Get a booth at BEA if you don’t already have one. If you can’t, get a sidewalk permit and sit next to the falafel stands outside the Javitz Center. Offer anyone with a badge $100 or $150 off an online purchase of a Sony Reader in the next two months. You’ll never have a better opportunity to get in good graces with some of the most prolific readers in the country. As a side bennie, all the indie booksellers attending have a vested interest in your reader becoming and staying more popular than the Kindle. And we read A LOT.
Thinking the unthinkable
This blog entry by Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” was floating around Twitter all day today, and I just can’t get it out of my head. I’ll post some of the quotes that I’m really fixated on, though you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.
“The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.”
“Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.”
“The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is ‘How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?’
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”
“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.”
Shirky is very clearly talking about newspapers and journalism here, but I have to say, some of these quotes cleanly struck me as things that we might be saying about books someday soonish.
In particular, in the first quote I selected, I’m struck by the truth that newspapers did, in fact, see change a-comin’, and they spent a lot of time thinking about how to deal with it, and they failed anyway. This reminds me a lot of the conversations the book industry is having within itself right now—how much do we charge for e-books? should TPBs have a simultaneous release with HCs? are large advances totally and completely insane, or are they just a necessary-evil level of insane? &tc. We know things are going to change and for the most part, we’re trying to figure out what we need to change in order to keep the jobs we love. But this quote makes me wonder: are we so busy devilling with the details that we’re not considering that our jobs as we know them now might not exist someday? Perhaps we’re not considering that trade paperback originals may not be the full answer—the full answer might involve a wholesale change in how booksellers, editors, writers, and other book people do their jobs. Keep in mind that I’m in my twenties. If I stay in bookselling until retirement age, whatever that’s going to be after Social Security nosedives, that’s at least four more decades. I can’t even concieve of what the book industry will look like in one decade, let alone four. Will it include the opportunity to make a living selling books to other people? What sort of changes will I have had to make to get there? What things can’t I see from my seat inside the inside of books?
Shirky: “Society doesn’t need papers. What we need is journalism.”
Would it be too much of a stretch to say:
“Society doesn’t need books. What we need are stories.”
Books have been around longer than newspapers, and I personally don’t think they’ll go away soon, or ever. (For proof I offer up the sheer joy on a kid’s face when you hand them a new book.) But reading Shirky’s entry did make me think that, if even for a little bit, I need to sit with the notion that books are not, in fact, crucial to existence. This is nearly impossible to fathom, especially living in New York, where everyone I meet is connected to books in some way, I read twice as much, and I’m pretty sure there’s something in the water that is causing me to have dreams related to the publishing industry every night. However, it might be the sort of thinking I need to open my mind to the possibilities that could keep my job around, in one form or another.
The world has proven it doesn’t need newspapers. Will it do the same thing to books?
LinkIndie is about keeping your eyes open
Filed under: book thoughts, bookselling, meta, read review linkindie |
Comments(2) Thought I’d share a little success story. Time Out NY recently linked to a WORD employee’s trailer for an upcoming film and talked about a great event we had last week. He also referred to our selection as “solid,” which is awesome, and talked about the two books he bought here. All of which is great, except–he hotlinked the two books he bought here by sending readers to the Amazon page. Ack.
So, I wrote to the email listed on the page:
“Hello,
I’m writing to thank Drew Toal for his mention of WORD yesterday. We appreciate the publicity and are always glad to hear that people have had a great experience in our store!
However, I do have one small favor to ask. In the future, when your blog writes stories about any of the fantastic independent bookstores in NYC, would you consider sending any book links to IndieBound? I’d hate to think that someone might have seen the books you bought at our store by clicking on the Amazon link, and then bought them on Amazon instead of with us or another indie bookstore. For example, the link to HOME LAND would have gone here.
Thanks for your consideration, and thanks again for the shout-out!”
Why indies can’t ignore online shopping
Filed under: book links, book thoughts, bookselling, read review linkindie |
Comments(19) I know there are a number, perhaps even a lot, of independent bookstores that are very reluctant to take part in e-commerce—the reason is usually something like: “we want people to actually come IN the store” or “this is a neighborhood bookstore.” Which are both very good reasons, and independent stores generally have a strong sense of mission and purpose that drives the people who own and work in them. Many stores have, even though they feel like it’s giving in, put up an e-commerce website. But very few indies (although there are notable exceptions) have done a solid job of harnessing their websites to really increase sales. IndieBound has been helping with this in terms of getting the word out, but it feels to me like there are still a lot of booksellers who are on the fence about being online in a serious way.
I have been thinking for some time that this is causing indies to lose business, even among their best customers. People who love to read tend to spend more time online—and most of online is littered with Amazon links. In fact, there are a number of compelling reasons why people choose to shop online, whether we like them or not. Of course, I am just one person and there’s no compelling reason to believe me, so instead, I invite you to listen to your (potential) customers. Read the comments on this post on litpark, “Question of the Month: Amazon, B&N, or Indie?“ Resist the urge to chime in for a minute—I think this post is better off with customers stating their true preferences and booksellers not jumping in.
You’ll see that the majority of the commenters, as of this moment, really like indie bookstores, and do shop there when possible; many consider Amazon “a backup,” as Susan puts it. They seem aware of how awesome a good indie store is, the benefits of shopping local, and the joy of browsing a well-stocked bricks & mortar store. We talk a lot about needing to educate customers about the good things about keeping it local and indie, but these folks could teach a course in it.
They also almost all buy books on Amazon. Why? Well, there’s a lot of reasons—read them.
Too many customers don’t know that they can have essentially the same experience on your website, if you have one. They can have the instant gratification of BUY IT NOW and also support their favorite indie bookstore–why don’t they know that? They can order a book online for in-store pickup, so they never have to worry if the book they want is in stock. They can have all the convenience of shopping online AND all the things they are telling you they love about our stores. Why aren’t we telling them?
The bricks & mortar experience is an important one, and I’m confident that with the right tools, we’ll get through this latest downtrun, and we’ll keep having the stores we love to go to every morning. But it’ll be a lot easier to keep those stores open if we start re-capturing sales that we are losing everyday by stubbornly over-emphasizing our physical presence. Show people how our in-store presence and service will extend to online purchases—show them they can have convenience AND service AND curated selection AND support their communities even when they’re too tired to go downtown—and we’ll see a change. Go read the post. You’ll see why I’m convinced that this cannot be ignored.
As an aside, one of the ways we can work towards this is to keep encouraging bloggers, publishers, authors, and other bookish folk to LinkIndie. Utne Reader blogged about it yesterday—how cool!
(h/t @AnnKingman for bringing the link to our attention on Twitter, h/t also to many various tweets I’ve been reading by people who like indies but also use Amazon–I appreciate getting a peek at your thinking!)
Tween books HELP
I was just looking through my blog stats and I realized that there are three searches that lead to my blog almost everyday:
1. bookavore. Shocking, que no?
2. book tattoos (or some variation thereof). Also not shocking.
3. tween books OR books for tweens OR is [TITLE] good for tweens OR please god help me I don’t know what book to buy for my 12 year old daughter OR something like that.
People, searches are turning up at my doorstep everyday looking for a good list of books for tweens and I am failing them, dismally.
So, help me out here. Leave in comments the best/your favorite books for tweens, and if so, why and which tweens. For the purposes of this list, tween means 10-13, and any books with “mature content” are excluded because so many parents of tweens are looking for books without it. If you’re so inclined, please offer a link (remembering, of course, to link indie).
Go!
LinkIndie-related letter
Filed under: book reviews, book thoughts, bookselling, read review linkindie |
Comments(2) “In the same story, Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken said that the prospect that Amazon may be a ‘very dominant player who could squeeze most of the profits out of this new market is frightening for authors and publishers.’
“Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, wrote in response:
“Perhaps the Authors Guild should suggest that authors not link only to Amazon on their websites. Acting as a sales agent for one dominant and frightening player may not be a wise long-term strategy. Many independent bookstores can fulfill orders as Amazon does, and IndieBound.org offers an affiliate program for authors and a connection to 200 independent bookstores.”
Yes!
To the letter above it, in which the president of BookSite says that “Carolyn Reidy is right in her appraisal that popular titles should be priced similarly whether traditionally bound or e-book editions. E-books have not lowered publishing costs of new popular titles so why should they receive a special discount?” I have this to say: I’m not an economics major or minor or anything, but I do know that one of the rules about pricing is that you can only price as high as the market will bear. And I can guarantee you that nobody is going to bear e-books being the same price as physical books. So we’ve got to work something out. If this industry makes the same mistakes as the music industry did, we’ll look even stupider than them, a rare feat.
To end this post, I have to tell you about a book, which I don’t do enough here. Yesterday we got in a special order book that I read the first chapter of while receiving, and it was so good I had to put it under other books so I didn’t read it. Normally, I would buy such a book and take it home. Not an option in this case, because it was an SO. And I didn’t want to wait to finish it. So after closing down the store, I left one light on and carefully finished the book, reading it in that half-opened way one reads a book so as not to break the binding. It was worth it. The book? FREAK SHOW, by James St. James (Speak, 9780142412312). The story of a transvestite teen who is stranded in a uber-conservative Florida boarding school, and one of the best voices I’ve read in a book in a long time. Order, ignore Perez Hilton blurb on front, and enjoy.
Read. Review. LinkIndie.
Filed under: book thoughts, bookselling, read review linkindie |
Comments(8) Alright, let’s do this thing.
As I explained in my previous post, my current project online is to promote IndieBound to authors and bloggers. I’d like to encourage as many people as possible to, when using a link that is about a book, link to IndieBound. I’m not asking anyone to stop linking anywhere, just to starting linking to IndieBound as well (although, of course, I won’t stop anybody who decides to exclusively link to IndieBound; in fact, I might kiss them).
I’d also like to spread the word about the IndieBound affiliate program. Many authors/bloggers link to Amazon because they earn a percentage of any sale that originates at their site. IndieBound has a very similar program that I think most people just don’t know about.
How do we do this?
Think about blogs you read. (If you don’t read blogs, then no worries, think about authors you read.) Which ones are most important to you? Do they ever talk about books, review books, etc?
Write an email to the blogger or author. Explain who you are, why you are writing (including that you’re a fan; can’t hurt), explain why local businesses and indie bookstores are important to you (and if relevant, state the ways in which you think they are important to the person to whom you’re writing), and state what you’re asking for.
What are you asking for, anyway? Well, if you’re me:
“What I’m basically asking for is that, when you and your fellow bloggers talk about or review a book, you include a link to IndieBound, not just to an online or chain bookstore. Many people prefer to buy locally when they can, and this linking will make it easier for them to do it. [If relevant: From reading your blog for years, I know that localism and sustainability are important to you, and this is a small step you can take to extend that the practice of that belief to your audience.]“
Make sure you include links to whatever makes sense–to IndieBound, to this blog post, to the websites of authors or bloggers who already do this, to your blog, to your store, to your favorite indie, to an indie close to them, or to either of these two great resources for this project:
1. The ABA’s letter to authors, asking them to consider being a part of the IndieBound Affiliate program. This letter shows how easy it is to join up and breaks it down to 7 steps.
2. An article from last week’s B0okselling this Week called “Easy Options Connect Authors to Indies.” Good examples of what people have already done; keep in mind that the word “blogger” could be inserted for “author” at basically any point in the article.
There’s no need to email tons of people, unless you want to. I’m starting with 3 blogs that I’ve read for a long time: Feministing, Shakespeare’s Sister, and Boing Boing. I expect that number will grow as I read posts in Reader that talk about books but don’t link to IndieBound. This post isn’t a once and done thing; this is a starting point.
All that said, I do want to know who you’re contacting and what success you have (including if you don’t, and especially if they tell you why they won’t—I am dead curious to know why people won’t). So please leave that information in comments, where we can all see it.
As for vocabulary, originally in my head I was calling this “Project Fairness in Linking,” which is awful, because I am shit at naming things. Luckily, my mom not only came up with a beautiful portmanteau for linking to local businesses (sustainalinking), she also came up with the following phrase, modeled on IndieBound’s Eat Sleep Read. What do you think:
