Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Monday, December 3, 2007

"Sublimely silly"


Uh oh. Amazon is all out of all three of my books! It was so cool to have a little plug for 101 Ways to Help Birds on Newsweek's blog, but it apparently led to a run on the few copies Amazon tries to keep in stock, and brought my book all the way up the charts to #97,871 in book sales. At this moment it's also #22 in "Endangered Species Books," and is not in the top hundred bird books. Oh, well. I wouldn't know how to deal with having a best seller, or even a not-too-bad seller, though it does mystify me why more people aren't interested in it, since it really does cover a huge spectrum of issues facing birds. Virtually every newspaper has been carrying stories about the declining numbers of birds with the release of Audubon's 2007 Watch List, but my book isn't on any of the writers' radar screens even though it covers every issue I've read about in those articles.

But Cafe Press still is carrying a CD I put together several years ago, "For the Boids," which is filled with radio programs I produced for various April Fools' Days and other unfathomable reasons. You can pay $15 for the CD, which sports a photo of me taken when I was four on the cover--the Beanie Baby Blue Jays were Photoshopped in. Or you can listen to most of the programs for free (I've never been much of a capitalist, have I?) on my webpage (scroll down to "From the Archives"). My all time favorite is "Where the Boids Are," in which two college students drive up the shore to Grand Marais for spring break to be where the boids are.