I May Be Responsible For This Post

This past weekend MotherReader ran a post on whether or not the blogosphere is keeping up on its blog reading. Well, I just checked out a blog I haven't visited in a couple of months and found a post I'm pretty certain I inspired. Clearly, I need to be doing a better job with my reading.

pixie stix kids pix is maintained by the Executive Director of the Association of Booksellers for Children, which I joined this past year. Last summer Bookseller Chick wrote a column for another site in which she suggested authors bring cookies in to booksellers to help promote themselves with them. While the column was somewhat tongue in cheek, I have, quite seriously, read of authors who bring chocolate into the office while visiting their editors and who send Christmas gifts (coffee mugs imprinted with their book titles, for instance) to all the publishing staff they have contact with. The closest I've ever come to doing any of these things was when I sent my editor taekwondo pins to distribute at the launch meeting for Happy Kid!, and I've been cringing ever since.

Anyway, I brought the article to the attention of the ABC listserv with the question, Does this work? Remember, I'd been published for years before I had the nerve to ask if I could sign stock. I'm going to start bringing cookies to strangers in stores? It was discussed on the listserv (they seemed kind of split on the cookie issue) and then, in August, pixie stix ran a post entitled The Cookie Theory: Author's Secret Weapon or Crummy Mess? that summed up the listserv's discussion. This is good because she made some suggestions to the listserv that I meant to save to read later, and, of course, I have no idea where they are now.

So, I feel much better about finding this than I felt when I found a Megan Whalen Turner fansite that mentioned me in a "What's with her, anyway?" kind of way because I hadn't loved the last Eugenides book.