Magical Mary’s non-fiction book for children, Prepare To Be Amazed: The Geniuses of Modern Magic, has been shortlisted for the 2007 Silver Birch Award.

Silver Birch is hosted by the Ontario Library Association, and the winners are chosen by readers aged 8 to 12.

Check out the book: Prepare To Be Amazed

I’m a little late on this but it’s still November 1 so if you’re into social change and want to help with a little experiment then read the post on worldchanging.com, then go to Amazon.com and buy their book today.

The plan is to use the internet and word of mouth to get enough people to buy the book today on Amazon to push it up in terms of sales rank. This will get the attention of Amazon, who will likely order more books, and will hit the radar of the indies too.

The plan is a little hit and miss on how the publishing industry actually works, but since I’m a tree-huggy, alternative girl, I want to buy this book, and, therefore, also want to support the enthusiasm of their plan. Since I’m a practical, hard-working bee in the publishing industry, let me explain where the cracks exist.

It is very smart to use word of mouth and generate lots of sales, even for a short period of time. Here’s the but …

1. You want to have lots of sales over a longer period of time, at least a week, not just one day. The perception is wow, they got a whole bunch of people to buy the book on one day. Great. But those sales likely equal the sales they would have gotten over a longer period of time. The pie doesn’t get bigger, the sales just all appear on one day. NOTE: I said this is the perception. Of course, you’ll sell more books because you’ve done an outreach campaign to educate people about your book. But you need to think about how to sustain the sales too.

2. Amazon’s bestseller list is influential to Amazon buyers and the publisher involved. A one-day blitz might get media attention or Amazon’s attention, but you want real long-term impact and, again, a way to sustain sales. Booksellers can return stock so you can do the blitz to get more orders but it doesn’t help you if they return them a month later.

3. Amazon ranks books based on sales over the previous hour. The ranking system is strange. I don’t know why authors keep checking it. It’s an interesting guide but so what if you were #1 for that hour and then #72 for the next hour and then back to #30,000 at the end of the day. That’s not the real data that Amazon looks at, or what a publisher or bookseller considers when making budget decisions.

What does work is the enthusiasm the WorldChanging Team has for the book, for giving readers a purpose and plan, for generating interest and publicity about what they are trying to do and for their book.

You can get attention. My point is simply do it for long-term benefit rather than a short-term media hit.

I recommend reading the comments after the post because there are some clever tips and information from other authors and book people about how to be even more effective than the one-day blitz, and how to be more effective in an indie shop. Read in particular what Maria Headley has to say.

Anyway, I’ve requested this book for my birthday but I’m not going to order from Amazon.com because even though I have a Canadian shipping address, they source US books. I want to support Canadian publishers and distributors so I order from Amazon.ca for hard to find titles and buy from my local shop.

Michael Winter, author of The Big Why and other books I’ve greatly enjoyed reading, has survived falling into an inferno. Speaking of the big why — why? Why was he near an inferno?

According to Quill and Quire, Michael was at the city dump, unloading some roofing from his room, lost his balance and fell into the open air inferno.

Quill reports: ‘Luckily for Winter, the usually deserted dump was not entirely deserted on this particular day. Sitting nearby, according to the author, was a solitary man enjoying some spirits who caught sight of Winter falling into the incinerator. ìHe saw me fall in, got help, opened the back doors [of the incinerator], and I flew out with my arm on fire,î says Winter.’
Quite an X-men story: Winter wrestles Inferno.

How many planets do we need?

According to the WWF 2006 Living Planet Report we’ll need two if we continue at our current level of resource striping (5 planets if every country’s footprint was as big as America’s–Canada is not far behind so don’t get too smug).

The Living Planet Report started in 1998 and outlines the state of the natural work and the impact of human activity upon the planet.

It’s not good news.

Humans (especially North Americans) are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed. Our total footprint now exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 percent.

We are drying the dishes faster than we can wash them.

It’s reports like the Living Planet Report that makes the Conservative Clean Air Act all the more laughable. By 2050, if we continue on our current trajectory with optimistic projections for moderate population increases, food and fibre consumption and CO2 emissions, we will be demanding resources at double the rate at which the Earth can generate them.

We tend to get stuck on the economical “incentives” for carrying on with the current state of affairs, for doing more studies, for basically doing nothing. What is the financial cost of overshooting by 50%, 100%, 150%?

Here’s the full report (PDF).

Not up for a big read, take the One Tonne Challenge. Oh wait, the Conservative government scraped that.

Here’s an old site, but still useful for hints: OneLessTonne.ca.

Or read George Monbiot’s book HEAT: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.

I just got this book, but the jacket flap tells me that Monbiot “demonstrates that we can achieve the necessary cut–a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030–without bringing civilizations to an end.”

Who’s up for sustaining life on Earth?

Random House Canada sent me HEAT, along with 10 tips from George.

10 Tips for How to Stop the Planet from Burning:

1. Cut your flights. Nothing else you do causes so much climate change in so short a time.

2. Think hard before you pick up your car keys. On average, 40% of the journeys made by car could be made by other means — on foot, by bicycle or on public transport.

3. Organize a “walking bus” to take children to school.

4. Ask your boss to devise a “workplace travel plan” that rewards people for leaving their cars at home.

5. Switch over to a supplier of renewable electricity. You don’t have to erect your own wind turbine, but you can buy your power from someone who has. (How do you do this????)

6. Ask a builder to give you an estimate for bringing your home up to R2000 standards.

7. Ditch your air conditioner.

8. Turn down your thermostat: 18 degrees is as warm as your house ever needs to be. You just have to get used to it. (It’s true. James has been freezing me for years, but now I’m used to it and often feel too hot in other people’s houses. Although I also prepared for their homes to be Arctic fresh.)

9. Make sure every bulb in your house is a compact fluorescent or LED.

10. Do not buy a plasma TV: they use 5 times as much energy as other models. (Is this plasma computer screens too?)

Want more? Lots of articles on www.monbiot.com.

The good folks at Geist are running their 3rd annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

(I know, for postcard fiction, they could have picked a shorter contest title, but it’s a good contest nonetheless.)

There’s big money to be had in postcard fiction:
1st Prize: $250, 2nd Prize: $150, 3rd Prize: $100

Postcard fiction is one of my favourite formats, perhaps I will bore you sometime with my entries from previous years, which have never graced the honourable mentions, then you can tell me they suck by your silence or cautionary feedback, i.e., “stick with the day job.”

Enough rambling, go to the Geist website for the contest details.

In a nutshell, mail Geist a postcard and write max. 500 words (fiction or non-fiction) that in some way relates to the image on your postcard.

Here are last year’s winners.

Congratulations to Aaron, winner of the bool.

Here’s my YouTube video of the random draw, watch it now.

Don’t know what a bool is, here’s how it started.