The Amazon ranking for your title gives you an idea of how popular your book is in the past hour. A rank of 1 = the best, hottest selling book. The challenge with tracking your rank is that it changes over the day and doesn’t really tell you overall how you’re doing, just how you’re doing that hour.

Admittedly you can make assumptions about how well your book is doing by looking at different ranges, 1-1000 being damn good.

You can track your Amazon ranking by RSS or Twitter:
Booklert from MCQN.

Soles United is taking used Crocs (those holey shoes) and recycling them into new shoes, then donating them to people in need around the world. To date, Soles United has donated over a million shoes to people in need in places like Armenia, Cambodia, Chad, Darfur, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Malawi, Mali, Moldova, Philippines, Romania, Swaziland, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Quite the list.

Check out the Soles United website for a video on how it works and how to donate.

You may have seen it in the Globe and Mail or heard about it on the tv or radio, this week (June 9-14) was National Blood Donor week.

Canadian Blood Services, the national, not-for-profit charitable organization that manages the blood supply in Canada (except for Quebec), is running a campaign called “Because”. It’s purpose is to encourage people to donate blood, but also valuable platelets and plasma.

I like that the campaign ties the process of giving blood to the process of receiving it. Part of the campaign portrays blood recipients thanking the donors who have improved or even saved their lives.

Thankyourdonor.ca is a place where recipients can share their stories, photographs and videos about how receiving blood or blood products made a difference in their life.

Quote: From Canadian Blood Services:

Since blood donation is an anonymous gift, recipients normally have little opportunity to thank the people who may have saved their lives. “It is such a moving experience when recipients visit blood donor clinics to share their stories and thank donors for their generosity,” says Steve Harding, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at Canadian Blood Services. “With this social media initiative, we are trying replicate that experience on a wider scale so that more donors can witness first-hand the power of their donation.”

Personal stories can have a powerful impact on people’s motivations to donate. It can come across as a cheesy, overt play on emotions, or it can be a true heartfelt story from donors and recipients.

I like this video. It’s informational and personal.

Do you have a story to tell?

ThankYourDonor.com or YouTube.com/thankyourdonor or post comments here.

Have you given blood before? Do you regularly donate?

Have you ever received blood? I don’t know if I know anyone who’s received blood. Have you received blood?

Quillpill is a micro-blogging site, which is currently in private beta. The service lets users write and read content on mobile devices. Yes, it’s another version of Twitter, but Techcrunch had an interesting article about how Quillpill takes a totally different approach by wanting to know what stories you would like to tell. The site is primarily aimed at aspiring authors and readers of fiction.

See the full TechCrunch article …

Osocio is a great site dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. On Friday, they had a cool piece on a London streetart campaign aimed at encouraging Londoners to make more time for reading.

The campaign Osocio is referring to is a Booktrust website called GetLondonReading.co.uk.

The campaign uses streetart and a interactive map to showcase books set in different neighbourhoods in London.

The campaign started at street level on Tuesday 25 March and ran throughout April. The book campaign also featured more than 20 library-based author events.

See photos on Flickr of the stencil art…

For future reference, Seth Godin on How to Read a Business Book.

Fridays are fun.

Over at MyNameIsKate.ca I read about a book meme to write about the book you’re reading now and to quote page 123.

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson is the book I’m reading right now. It’s one of my favourite books this year. I know I should have read this as a hardcover so that I could enjoy the full visual appeal of the book. Although as a paperback, it’s pretty damn good. The cover is like a chocolate brown Moleskine with a belly band (which is a paper banner that wraps around the belly of the book). In this case it’s part of the cover image. Really the design details are wonderful, which is no surprise because CS Richardson is a well-regarded book designer.

The quality doesn’t stop at the design, the writing is worthy of such a great package.

The End of the Alphabet is one of my favourites because it has that level of quirkiness that borders on magical realism but is certainly realism. In this case Ambrose Zephyr is diagnosed with an incurable and untreatable disease. He has 30 days, give or take a day, to put his affairs in order. He makes a list A-Z of places and things he’d like to do before he kicks off.

On page 123, his wife Zipper Ashkenazi is waiting for her husband to have his shirts fitted at the tailoring shop of Mr. Umtata.

Quote: A fresh shirt was unwrapped. Ambrose strained out a smile as he dressed.
A miracle, Umtata. As always.
As you say sir.
A bit loose across the shoulders though.
Indeed sire. Shall we check the fit?
With that Mr Umtata took Ambrose Zephyr in his arms. Allow me the lead sir, he whispered.
The men dipped. Deeply, expertly.
Zipper Ashkenazi laughed out loud. For the first time in days.

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson (Random House Canada)