Greetings from the Amy Stewart Entertainment Committee

My husband owns a tiny, one-person, appointment-only bookstore (Downtown Brown Books), so he's able to go to work every day. Last week he came upstairs to say good-bye, looked around at my office and at me painting at my easel, and said, "So...what have you got going on today?"

I just shrugged and said, "This is it. I'm the chair of the Amy Stewart Entertainment Committee, so I'll just be here keeping myself occupied all day."

I'm in between books right now (Dear Miss Kopp will be out in January, and the one after that will probably come out in September 2021 and I'm already finished with it, and waiting for word from my publisher before starting the next one), so really I do just spend my days trying to keep my spirits up and keep myself occupied. 

This month's dispatch is really just a rundown of how I do that.

To those of you who are going to work every day, to those of you who are taking care of children or parents or loved ones, to those of you who are far away from the people you love--my heart goes out to all of you.

Art in Isolation is weirdly wonderful

Philip Mould is a British art dealer and host of an interesting art show called Fake or Fortune? which you can stream online. During the shutdown he made a series of YouTube videos called Art in Isolation in which he shows you around his posh country home and talks about some of the art in his personal collection. He doesn't seem to know how to make a playlist, so you sort of have to hunt around to find all of them on his YouTube channel, but I've posted the first one here. The art is not all to my taste, but the videos are charming and personable and escapist.

The Calm app is pretty great

My health plan gave me free access to Calm, a meditation app. I already have Headspace, which I like quite a lot, but hey, I'll take a free thing. The sleep stories in Calm are a work of beauty, and you might find it worthwhile for those stories alone. Matthew McConaughey's story about the stars puts me to sleep every time, as does Stephen Fry's story about the lavender fields in Provence. Some of these are available on YouTube if you'd like to try them. Don't listen to them during the day, though--they'll sound ridiculous. Wait until it's late at night, dark and quiet, and you're ready to quiet the shrieking monkeys in your head and get some rest.

I Made Some More Art Classes

Since we last spoke, I've been making travel sketching classes on Skillshare...and a class on how to paint a chicken. Chicken portraiture is a speciality of mine, I don't know if you knew that.

It's been rewarding to me to put these out into the world and see people give it a try. Shout-out to Katie Elzer-Peters, reader of this newsletter, who dove into watercolor and is having so much fun, and to Janet Eastman, who wrote a whole series of stories about my classes on garden and nature journaling and turned up many other Portlanders doing the same thing.

These classes are short, affordable, and aimed at beginning and intermediate artists. Take a look at everything I'm teaching here--and this link will all give you 2 months free on Skillshare, which gives you plenty of time to explore everything they have on offer, including all kinds of other classes on writing, art, cooking...whatever you might want to learn.

I took a weird bit of my historical research and made a collage about it

During WWI, we collected peach pits to use as charcoal filters in gas masks for our soldiers fighting overseas. The government paid farmers $7.50 a ton for any peach pits they could load on a train. “It is urged as a patriotic duty that all farmers turn in every available peach pit,” this article reads.

See the rest of the story here....

Pinterest has been surprisingly inspiring lately

I didn't know that Pinterest rolled out a vastly improved search function a couple years ago, and now you can very quickly build amazing visual boards of anything that interests you. I'm always investigating some very particular style of art, and now I realize that if I start a board on that subject, Pinterest can find me pictures that are astonishingly close to what I'm interested in. If you've been away from Pinterest for a while, maybe now's a time to go take another look...whether you're doing art, books, travel (dreaming), food, gardening...I've found so many more new people and new ideas than I ever did when I used the platform before. You can find me here.

New Art in My Shop

I've been painting A LOT. That art has to go somewhere. Maybe it needs to go home with you. Feel free to stop by my little art shop anytime and have a poke around. You can always see new stuff on Instagram, too.

Asked and Answered...

Ask me a question and win the book of your choice! This month's winner is Mary from Irvine, CA.

Mary asks: How do sales to libraries affect authors? More specifically, are we readers doing authors a disservice by using libraries as our source of books, or are libraries a good source of sales for authors?

Good question! Physical books are, of course, purchased by libraries, and they do tend to buy hardcovers, for which authors are paid more. (An author gets $3-4 for a hardcover and $1-2 for a paperback or ebook, roughly). And those physical books do wear out, get lost and damaged, etc, making libraries repeat customers. So that's great!

Ebooks and digital audiobooks do not get worn out or damaged, so publishers of those formats have lots of convoluted pricing models aimed at getting libraries to pay roughly what they'd pay for that hardcover that has to be re-purchased over time as it wears out. There are so many different ways of doing this, and the accounting is not really shown to authors. Most of us have no idea what we get paid per library download. Not much. Pennies. Dimes, maybe.

But libraries and librarians are TREMENDOUS advocates for reading and for writers! I speak to SO MANY library book groups! Those people will go home and talk about what a lovely time they had at book club, and tell their friends to read that book. And library patrons DO go on to buy books for themselves and as gifts.

So libraries are all good, all the time, and while I'm here, let me take an opportunity to give a shout-out to Libby, the swell new app for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from your library. Also, please donate to your local Friends of the Library.

It's worth noting that in the UK, authors get a royalty of about 8 cents every time one of their books is checked out from the library. British authors are too dignified to talk about money, but some have told me it's a small but nonetheless very welcome check that turns up every year.

This month's contest is different!

In honor of libraries, and in honor of the fact that I just cleaned up my office, I'm doing a different type of giveaway this month.

I have MANY extra copies of the UK/Australia editions of these books. They are exactly like the American versions, just with a different publisher's logo.

What to do with so many extras? I've been depositing them with the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood, but it's slow going. I have to wait until one is taken to put another one there. This could take me years.

So if you win this month's contest, I will send you all three of these, plus some extras, with the provision that you have a Little Free Library, waiting room, or other such book exchange type place to deposit them.

We can sort out the exact number when I choose a winner. Meanwhile, please head over here to enter, and if you've entered before, ask the same question or a different one! I love all your questions and hope to get to all of them eventually.

I'm doing lots of virtual events these days

I'm always happy to do an online chat with a book club, but now I'm also doing actual presentations, like the sort of thing I used to do on the road in the Before Times. So if you run a lecture series or any sort of event series and you need a virtual speaker, you can go here to see four types of virtual events I'm doing now. Feel free to pass this on if you know someone who's putting on these types of events right now.

What Are You Reading?

I was so happy to have the latest Ruth Galloway mystery to read this month! Elly Griffiths is a friend, so I might be biased, but I love these novels about a British archaeologist who solves mysteries. 

Murder by the Book did a Facebook Live with Elly, and I'm sure they would love to send you a copy. This is a wonderful bookstore in hard-hit Houston and they sure could use your support. They might even still have some of Elly's signed bookplates to ship with your order.