Top 10 Tips for Book Gift Giving

A book is always a great gift … especially if you take the time to match the recipient’s taste in fiction or nonfiction. Suddenly, your thoughtfulness becomes part of the gift. Whether your relatives or friends are interested in the Civil War, literature, romance novels, westerns, paranormal fiction, railroads, guns, cooking, collecting old comic books, antique automobiles, or anything else, there's always a book that will bring a smile to their face.

Here are my Top 10 Tips for Book Gift Giving

1. Write a personal message on the flyleaf that won't get tossed out like last year's Christmas card.
2. Search out an author signing for your recipient’s favorite author or give a collector’s version of the recipient’s favorite book.
3. If you need professional help or want something unique, shop at an independent book store, or specialty bookstore.
4. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime then shipping is free, or mail books early to take advantage of media class at the Post Office.
5. Give a book as a piece of art, like a fine print book, unique coffee table book, favorite book as a child, or collectible cover art.
6. Make a highly personal photo book with ShutterFly or Apple Photos.
7. Give a bookseller gift card for e-book and audio book enthusiasts.
8. If you’re giving a gift to a college student, tuck a crisp $100 bill into the flyleaf as a bookmark.
9. If your friend or relative already owns piles of books, give a unique set of book ends to hold them in their proper place.
10. One final tip that comes close to re-gifting—find an Amazon print book that includes a “Match Book” deal. Gift the printed version and download the e-book for yourself.

Children's books are also great gifts. We search for autographed storybooks for our grandkids. Bookstores always have children book signings around the holidays, and this is one area where we join the crowd. The icing on the cake is that we get to read from one of these books when we visit.

Books are a great entertainment value. They provide hour upon hour of personal pleasure, and then they can be passed on to another person. What could be better?

You might even gift one of these.

Happy Birthday Grandpa

My best birthday gift. Click here to see the full video.

Interview with Author’s Academy

The Author’s Academy is a subscription website dedicated to teaching “authors how to write, produce, and market their books successfully.” On Wednesday, Grael Norton interviewed me in a teleconference titled "How to Sell 1,000Books this Holiday Season." The title of the talk comes from a few seasons ago when I sold over 1,000 print copies in December. Today, this is not a large number for me, but my holiday sales are now heavily weighted toward e-books.

You can also read a summary of the interview at Writ3r Addiction.

Despite the popularity of e-books, print books still make outstanding gifts. You can choose a fiction or nonfiction book that precisely targets the interests of the recipient. A book in their favorite genre or about their hobby can make them happy, plus it shows you cared enough to pick a gift just for them. For a reasonable price, a book gives hours upon hours of enjoyment and can even be revisited in years to come, and unlike a Christmas card that gets discarded or thrown in a box, a personal inscription on the flyleaf of your gift book lasts forever.

This holiday season, give a book to someone you love … preferably one of these, of course.

Reading: The Struggle … Really?

Reading a struggle? Tim Parks writes that modern man’s addiction to electronic gadgets means reading is relegated to odd snatches of time. His advice is that we dinosaur writers need to adapt and learn to tell a story in fewer words than were used in the theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies. (The 87 word tune at the beginning of The Beverly Hillbillies is famous for terse storytelling.)

Park opens his New York Review of Books article by writing, “The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago, and the big question is how contemporary fiction will adapt to these changes, because in the end adapt it will. No art form exists independently of the conditions in which it is enjoyed.”

Adapt? Writing a story using Twitter might be fun and even creative as hell, but it would not be a novel. Park doesn’t actually suggest that writers restrict themselves to 140 characters, but he does predict that a novel “will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out.” To a great extent, this is because Park apparently believes fiction is art and must be studied, rather than merely enjoyed.

He writes:

“Let’s remember just what hard work it can be to read the literary novel pre-1980. Consider this sentence from Faulkner’s The Hamlet:

‘He would lie amid the waking instant of earth’s teeming minute life, the motionless fronds of water-heavy grasses stooping into the mist before his face in black, fixed curves, along each parabola of which the marching drops held in minute magnification the dawn’s rosy miniatures, smelling and even tasting the rich, slow, warm barn-reek milk-reek, the flowing immemorial female, hearing the slow planting and the plopping suck of each deliberate cloven mud-spreading hoof, invisible still in the mist loud with its hymeneal choristers.’”

Could he have found a more writerly example? Mark Twain would never write a sentence like that. For that matter, neither would JK Rowling, Stieg Larsson, or Raymond Chandler. Good grief. Maybe it was pompous writing, not texting that drove people away from long format fiction.

Except that people have not abandoned novels. Novels are increasingly popular. Instead of the novel adapting to modern lifestyles, our lives have adapted to reading in a different manner. Many of us do our reading on e-readers that we bring with us all the time because they weigh less than a Little Golden Book.  

A good novel is the best stress reliever ever invented. A good novel captivates the reader. A good novel instantly transports the reader to another place and time. And a good novel is inexpensive and accessible. 

A novel provides a unique escape from the relentless pinging for our attention. Despite what our ego may tell us, being constantly tethered to an iThingy is not obligatory. The world will not miss you for an hour or so. When you need a break, just turn off your other devices and open a novel. Give a storyteller some dedicated time and you’ll be able to handle your concerns and responsibilities with aplomb.

Need a gift for Father’s Day—June 15th.

My father is furthest out on the wing.

Father’s Day is special. I use the day to remember a father I never knew. He died in WWII in the cockpit of his P-51. Since I was born after he shipped out to Iwo Jima, we never met, but I grew to know him through his brothers and sisters. If he was anything like them, he was a fine person.

I also like connecting with my kids, even though they’re now adults. The best gift they ever gave me was six grandkids. Now, that’s a great present! I don’t need anything more from them, but who am I to go against tradition. I look forward to my gifts because they always show thought, and that means more than the gift itself.

If you’re looking for a gift idea for your father, I have a great idea—books.  

In a previous year, I wrote:

Books are great gifts. For a few dollars, they provide hours of entertainment that can be enjoyed anywhere. A good book sheds life’s tensions as it transports the reader to another place and time. Of course, I’m biased. I write books and hope you’ll pick one of mine as a Father’s Day gift. But even if you don’t, all books bring unique pleasure.

The best gift is a vacation … and the least expensive vacation is a book. A novel effortlessly transports the reader to another world. With a good book, dad can take a fifteen minute vacation or while away an entire afternoon. Either way, he returns feeling refreshed and more content with life.

Gift books don’t have to be fiction. A respite with a nonfiction book about a special interest can also be relaxing. The great thing about books is that there are numerous ones for every interest, hobby, sport, or enthusiasm. If for some reason, your dad can’t get away to fish, golf, or whatever, he can frequently find a few minutes to read about his favorite activity. A good book allows him to indulge himself and possibly pick up a few pointers.

There is another reason I like to give books as gifts: I can write something personal on the flyleaf that won’t get thrown out like an old greeting card.

The most important thing is to remind your father that you love him. The perfect book is far more personal than most gifts because it’s aimed directly at what you father enjoys. Put some serious thought into the right book to show you really tried to please him.

By the way, there's still time to order one of the Steve Dancy Tales for Father's Day.

Honest Westerns ... filled with dishonest characters.

Gifts for Graduation Season

Ron Charles, entertainment and book columnist for the Washington Post has written an interesting article about gift books for graduation. Good timing since we are grappling with an appropriate gift for a niece. Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss looks to be a fun way to conceal a cash gift—much more clever than a stodgy old money gift card.

Charles quotes Paul Bogaards, director of media relations at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, as saying, “parents want to provide their kids with a map to a job and the prospect of a happy, fulfilled life. A book is obviously the perfect vessel for delivering both. A bottle of bourbon also works.” Since our niece is graduating high school, I think we'll opt for a book.

My sojourn in direct marketing

I semi-retired early and went into consulting to forestall boredom and to help make ends meet.* I ended up consulting for a Boston direct marketing travel company. I expected to consult with them for a few weeks, but ended up working for them for over a decade.

Direct marketers are a different breed of retailers. This travel company never advertised and you could not buy their trips through a travel agent, yet they were the largest tour operator in the country. All of their sales came through their call center. How did they get customers? Like Land’s End, L.L. Bean, Crazy Shirts, and other direct marketers, this company promoted its products primarily through paper and online catalogs … and then depended heavily on repeat business.

Direct marketing is a specialized segment of the retail business and it is far more data-driven than store-front retailing. Because everything is ordered directly, they know each customer and how they behave. They know what they buy, how often they buy, their price sensitivity, and their product satisfaction level. They are fixated on customer data because their business models are based on what they call lifetime value. Once a customer is acquired, they know statistically how much business that customer will generate in future years. Since they focus on lifetime value, direct marketers are obsessed with customer satisfaction. They are constantly measuring every aspect of their business, analyzing the data, and adjusting their practices.

What brought this to mind was a New Yorker article by George Packer: “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?” Amazon is arguably the best direct marketer in the world. The following alleged comments by Bezos may or may not have been made in 1995, but they fit perfectly with the direct marketing business model.

“Bezos said that Amazon intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt cheap on the Internet … Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. Two decades later, Amazon sells a bewildering array of products: lawnmowers, iPods, art work, toys, diapers, dildos, shoes, bike racks, gun safes, 3-D printers.”

I believe Amazon has been good for books. The Kindle—and other e-readers—have revitalized reading. Amazon has, however, been bad for bookstores. But whenever I start to feel bad for Borders, Barnes and Noble, et al., I just download a streaming copy of You’ve Got Mail from Amazon.

*  I’m interested in etymology of phrases.  “Where it (this phrase) comes from is hard to be sure about. It’s often said that it’s from bookkeeping, in which the total at the bottom (“end”) of the column of income must at least match that at the bottom of the expenditure column if one is not to be living beyond one’s income”—worldwidewords.org

Go On A Blind Date... With A Book

Here's something you can't do on Amazon... go on a blind date. Chris Jager at lifehacker reports that a Sydney independent bookstore, Elizabeth's Bookshops, is wrapping novels in brown paper and selling them as blind dates with a book. These books are hand selected, staff favorites, so the promise is that each will be a good read. That's not always true with a blind date, so take a book out to your favorite café instead