A note for help

Russ Marshalek, Marketing Director for Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, GA, is barging in here.

Please note: Karin has been kind, sweet and wonderful enough to let me barge in here and interrupt the flow with an urgent message, a call for assistance, a cry for help. I'm interrupting your regular programming schedule because we at Wordsmiths are in financial strain, stress, and need, and for the southern author community, heaps upon heaps of which (a lot of y'all count in this list!) have actually graced our store and our stage, this is, obviously, the quickest way to get the message out.

Basically, today we launched the Save Our Bookstore campaign with a blog from Zach, our owner/operator. You can read the entirety of it here. I'll summarize:

Today, the word has gone out that we are beginning a hard, tooth-and-nail effort to keep from closing. We’ve gone to the public, to everyone, to the readers and book lovers and authors and musicians and members of our now-massive extended, crazy, book-loving family, with the fact that, as a result of the massive black hole that was our previous location (some of you, many of you, in fact, remember that location, a block off the Decatur square but so far away from foot traffic...when we moved the store in March, we went from being isolated to being THE center of town, and also now pay about 1/2 the rent we used to) and the impossibility of catch-up, combined with a massive author event that required a large up-front payment to the publisher for books that didn't sell, the store can’t catch itself fast enough, despite the now-profitability of our new location.

I am in the process of trying to piece together a massive weekend of everything that's worked, everything that's made Wordsmiths what we are-authors, music, food, maybe even a dancing zebra-for the weekend of August 15-17. If anyone, anyone at all, is interested in helping or participating, or has ideas, please don't hesitate to email me.

And if anyone is interested in reading the entire missive from us on our Save The Bookstore campaign, or in (bless your lovely, lovely hearts) donating to help keep us around, all that information, including a Paypal button, is on our homepage.

Here we go. Thank you.