Deconstructing a disappointing effort
Last Monday we unveiled the Powells wish list for the Guys Lit Wire book fair with great excitement. This was our fourth year of running a book fair for a struggling library in the US and we have always done astonishingly well. Between past efforts for incarcerated juveniles in LA County and schools on the Navajo and White River Apache reservations, plus last year at Ballou SR High School in Washington DC, supporters have purchased more than 2,100 books off our wish lists and had them sent to the respective schools. Last year at Ballou we busted all records with 800+ in the spring book fair and another 150+ in a smaller holiday fair in November.
You can understand how hopeful we were last week to do this wonderful project all over again.
As I explained in my post at Guys Lit Wire, we elected to stay with Ballou because this school is literally building a library from the ground up. Last year they had less than one book for each of their 1,200 students - only 63 in the fiction section. Through our efforts and others, they had two books for each student this spring. (The American Library Association standard is ELEVEN books for student in school libraries.) Ballou was suffering from donor fatigue however - most of their support has disappeared but their need remains the same. The library is an incredibly vital part of the school (chess club, manga club, poetry club and on and on meet there), and we want to help them make it the crown jewel it deserves to be.
We are all book lovers after all - how could we walk away when the job was not done?
So we put 525 books the list with the advisement of Ballou librarian Melissa Jackson and we started the book fair with great optimism. Our outreach this year was without parallel; I am not exaggerating when I say that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the book fair via blog mentions, facebook updates and countless tweets. I was frankly stunned by how much help we received in spreading the word. Folks started buying books immediately and it looked like we were set for yet another sellout.
And then everything just slowed down.
As of today we have sold 117 books off the wish list. We are in the middle of the second week and seeing number similar to the second day for the past book fairs. I have honestly no idea why this has happened. Some people have suggested we held the fair too close to tax day, but that has never been an issue in the past. Some have suggested the Powells wish list, which requires you to manually type in the school's address, is too complicated. As we have always gone through Powells and strongly support independent bookstores, we just don't see how to change that and hope it is not an issue this time.
Some have suggested that the economy is a factor but as we are economically in better shape now than at any point during the previous book fairs, that is a hard one to accept. Additionally, many of the books on the list are less than $10, even with shipping, so the cost of helping is really quite small. Some have gone so far to suggest library fatigue and honestly, that one is just too painful to imagine.
One former donor told me she did not contribute this time because she preferred we choose another library and not give more than once to Ballou. While I certainly respect her choice to not help us, this one really hurt. We want to stay with Ballou partly because so many others have walked away and left the work unfinished. We thought we were doing the best thing possible for the school and students by not quitting now and yet I can not help but think that if I had another school with a fresh compelling story it might have gotten more support. But honestly, who knows.
This is all, quite frankly, enormously frustrating.
In the end, we will never know why the response to the book fair this spring has been so flat. As an author who has been urged by one and all to participate in social media to increase my own book sales, I have to say I find it fascinating how so much online activity can result in such little concrete action. It is the easiest thing in the world to hit "retweet" but actually taking action is a whole lot tougher. Maybe we are just becoming a world of passive donors - we think by spreading the word we have done enough. That doesn't put books on the shelves however, and those real books in the real hands of kids in DC are what this whole project is all about.
The book fair continues through the weekend and we would certainly appreciate your suport. We will be back in the fall, still with Ballou, to try again. Maybe it will take many more small steps to reach out goal but we'll keep trying. Somebody, after all, has got to fill those damn shelves and if it's not us then who will it be? That's why we can't walk away; there's no one else behind us that is willing to do the work.
