Steve Bissette (one of three authors of the book about me and the stuff I wrote) is running a small competition for bookshops at http://srbissette.com/?p=2101
The Graveyard Book has made it onto another few Best of the Year lists: http://www.briankeene.com/?p=887,
http://www.bartsbookshelf.co.uk/2008/10/19/the-graveyard-book-by-neil-gaiman/
Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide list #1 (Books for younger people)
Boing Boing Holiday Gift Guide list #2 (Fiction) [Which reminds me -- Damien Walter did a great interview with Cory Doctorow at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/25/cory-doctorow-little-brother]
http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/11/more-on-our-coraline-suitcase.html has the best list so far of mysterious Coraline boxes. (There appear to be eleven of them in the wild so far. Thirty nine have not yet been sent, or reported. I'm enjoying this.)
...
Reading Steve Bissette's blog post gave me an idea...
Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab just sent me an extra couple of sets of their Graveyard Book scents. (Eau de Ghoul seems extremely popular on their forum.) (And the very final handful of signed Snow Glass Apples booklets and vials can still be had before the Holidays -- for now -- at the CBLDF shop site.) I have a large pile of lovely two-sided Graveyard Book posters (one side Dave McKean's cover, one side Chris Riddell's cover) that Bloomsbury did.
And I thought, I should DO something with this stuff...
So what I'm going to do is this:
First I'm going to sign a bunch of posters -- probably about 50. Then I'm going to give them and the BPAL Graveyard Book scents to the wonderful Cat Mihos. And I'm going to tell her that we're running something that isn't exactly a competition, but is sort of smaller and more informal and a bit more easy-going. It's this:
From here until the end of the year (and further out than that, if the stuff holds out), if you do something effective to help get other people reading The Graveyard Book, tell Cat, and she'll send you a signed poster.
(Something effective in this case would include persuading your bookshop or library to do a Graveyard Book display, and taking a photo of it and sending it to Cat, teaching it in your school, reviewing it for your local paper or doing something equally as imaginative.)
If you do something Awesome and Amazing to get other people reading The Graveyard Book (for example, talking your whole town or city into having one of those months where everyone in the town reads the same book, and it's The Book In Question...) then you get a signed Graveyard Book poster and you get one of the BPAL Graveyard Book scent collections. And she'll probably throw in one of the Graveyard Book Neverwear tee shirts as well.
(Like this one.)
(Like this one)Send email, photos, cuttings from your local paper, proof that it was you and you alone who talked Oprah or Richard-and-Judy into doing The Graveyard Book on their TV book clubs, etc., to Cat Mihos, Furrytiger@Gmail.com . Do not send them to me. I will not have the swag. I will not be handing it out. I'm merely going to set this thing in motion and sign fifty posters -- twenty five on the McKean side, the other twenty five on the Riddell side.
Cat's decision is final. She'll blog the things she gets in as she goes along at the Neverwear Blog (http://kittysneverwear.blogspot.com/). And then every now and then I'll do a round up here.
How does that sound?
Labels: Best Of, cat mihos, Neverwear tee shirts, steve bissette, strange ideas, The Graveyard Book