Selling the idea of selling books by selling the idea of bookselling...

(...and so on)

Yesterday, I spent a good deal of time lamenting the difficulties of doing my job. While the stupid email issues are still a plague (of locusts! locusts!) of the day, I feel I'd be horribly remiss in my duties and in my perspective to not follow up with something focusing on the flip side-the major happy, if you will.

I'm fortunate enough to have worked with Zach, the owner/operator of Wordsmiths Books and the guy who gets to do the nitty gritty of actually making this idea a solid reality, for a while now, and I can say that, email issues to the contrary, I'm the luckiest kid on the block to get to be a part of this wordsmithing Wordsmiths-thing.

It is a wonderful life, spending every waking hour presenting the idea of Wordsmiths Books to both the literary community and the Decatur community, and where it overlaps as the Decatur literary community? It's the best.

For instance:

I had the opportunity to sit and chat with local author and all-around contender for writer-mom of the year Laurel Snyder a few days ago. We were put in contact with each other through mutual book-industry contact s that I could spend several paragraphs describing, but instead will choose to just explain the 6 degrees of all of this by saying that the entire industry is interlinked like a small-town spiderweb, and leave it at that.

While explaining to Laurel exactly what it is we at Wordsmiths Books want to accomplish-creating something upon which the literary community in Decatur can base itself-I watched her go from early morning groggy to excited, nay, hyper about the possibilities.

I left the coffee-talk even more invigorated than I'd been when I went in, all from a simple discussion that, essentially, was my selling someone on the idea of selling books.

Because let's not forget-that's all we have right now, an idea. An idea that's slowly growing in size and support, in such a way that I can't stop and think about it.

There's this awful show on VH-1 featuring realtors who specifically work on celebrity real estate deals. The first and only episode that I saw had "Malcom in the Middle" star Frankie Munz selling a house to buy another house, both with the same agent. There's a moment midway through the episode where the agent starts looking at facts and figures regarding the selling price of the houses, and what his cut would be if the deal was executed. While the numbers are run at the bottom of the screen, he states "I can't think about the commission, I can't think about the commission". After the bottom-of-screen tabulation displays a commission tally of around $300,000, he smiles for a second and softly says "...thinking about the commission...but can't think about the commission".

That's how I feel, being involved with a project that's making this many people this happy. It really is the best thing in the world, in a number of ways, to promote the idea of Wordsmiths Books-everyone seems to have the Laurel Snyder response of lighting up, which is appreciated, because for every mountain of praise there's another Outlook failure. And through good times and bad, difficult and easy, I refuse to stop and "look at the commission", if you will, until that countdown Zach's keeping reaches store opening.

...but yeah, it IS an awesome position to be in.