Anyone Looking Up Double Newsletter Co-op On Google...

can now find out what it means. Harcourt was nice enough to let me know, and since I learned how to cut and paste yesterday (okay, I learned in kindergarten, but not the high tech cutting and pasting skill, which I acquired yesterday), here, straight from my e-mail, is the actual definition:

Based on the number of orders a bookstore places with us, a percentage of that money goes toward their “co-op” money, which is a pool of funds that we set aside to pay them to promote our titles (like in special displays, store newsletters, etc.). The more money a store spends on Harcourt titles, the more co-op money they will accrue.

So, a double newsletter co-op means that we will pay them twice the standard co-op fee to place a certain title in their store newsletter... [I]t’s a way to encourage booksellers to promote titles we feel really strongly about. (Hence dead & the gone’s inclusion!)

You may wonder why I learned cut and paste yesterday. It was to put that nifty link to the dead and the gone over at Amazon on the left side of the blog. Yes, now I can obsess over the dead and the gone's Amazon number. And it has one. As of about five minutes ago, it was a rousing 235,219. When I woke up this morning, it was approximately 158,000, and given that there's almost seven months before the Harcourt version is published, I'm sure the number will be in the stratosphere before too long. But it's still very exciting for me to see that it really does exist.

Two people have now read The Dead And The Gone, one of the original Bolivian hat selectees and Janet Carlson. Here's what the selectee had to say:

I just wanted to let you know that I received the book last Tuesday and read the entire thing that day, I couldn't put it down. I LOVED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Janet left out a number of !!!!!s when discussing the book with me, but she read it in one sitting also and was very impressed with the main characters and a few other things. I forgot to take notes (silly me).

Yesterday I got a royalty check, although not for Life As We Knew It, which is the royalty check I've been sleeping in the mailbox waiting for. Instead it was a check amounting to $83.82 for The Riddle Streak (current Amazon number 892,064). For those of you who have forgotten what it looks like, here's the photograph of Janet and me at the Adamstown Public Library, where The Riddle Streak was on display. It's the one in my right hand.

The Riddle Streak is the most autobiographical of my books, although the illustrator, Michael Chesworth, pictured the family as African Americans, which is a little hard to see in the photograph to the right. It was published in 1993, and if fourteen years from now I'm still getting royalties for Life As We Knew It and the dead & the gone, I'll be a very happy person.

I have to admit though, I'll be an even happier person if the royalty checks are for more than $83.82!