Our Bodies our Shelves is my collection of humorous essays about library life.
It got terrific reviews, even though you’ve never heard of it.
How many terrific reviews? Thirty excellent reviews on Amazon and over 100 on Good Reads. (Were there negative reviews too? Of course. But let’s not pay attention to them.)
Other than the fact that it’s a good read, why should you buy it?
It’s a great gift.
Anyone can buy a gift copy of a bestseller that everybody wants to read, like Where The Crawdads Sing or The Guardians.
But it takes a very special and thoughtful gift-giver to give the gift of a good book by a totally unknown writer.
Say your bookish friend has a birthday coming up, and you want to buy her a book she’ll love. You’re thinking of buying her Where the Crawdads Sing.
But? Chances are that at least one of her other friends has the exact same idea!
She could end up with multiple Crawdads!
How to avoid that? You need to buy her a book that you are absolutely certain she hasn’t read.
Trust me. She hasn’t read my book.
I know exactly how many people have read Our Bodies, Our Shelves. 1,471. Because that’s how many copies I’ve sold.
Okay, so some of those copies were sold to libraries. And others were shared among friends. Still? The odds are excellent that the recipient of your gift has not only never read Our Bodies, Our Shelves, but has no idea that it exists.
Plus it’s a humor book. Which means? It won’t frighten or depress her. Reading it won’t make her want to spend the rest of 2020 hiding under the bed.
Instead, it will make her laugh.
The world being the way it is, she probably needs all the laughs she can get.
In fact? So does everyone else on your 2020 Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanzaa/Festivus holiday gift list. So why not get that shopping done early and buy a copy for everybody on that list?
Then you can put your feet up, relax and read about Crawdads.
( Roz Warren writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times and is the author of two collections of library and book-related humor, Our Bodies, Our Shelves: A Collection of Library Humor, and Just Another Day At Your Local Public Library.)
I don’t want to give away my copy. Does that make me shelfish?
actually, you underestimate your sales as you do not include all the books you sold at readings, speaking events etc.