Gift lists made easy

One thing you rarely have to worry about when you’re an author is what to give people for gifts. That is, assuming you’ve had one or more books published that year and you haven’t already sent them copies. (It must be enscribed somewhere that your relatives never actually buy your books themselves!)

Of course, authors don’t get unlimited free copies of our books. And some of us have large families. But at least it’s a start on the stocking-stuffer list.

For the long term, I try to retain about twenty copies of each of my books, although my earlier ones (I was first published nearly twenty-five years ago) run far short of that. The problem is that I’ve sold more than seventy books. Do the math. Even considering that most of them are paperbacks, that’s a lot of storage space! They fill up the cabinets in my office and part of my older son’s closet. He’s away at college most of the year, so maybe he hasn’t noticed, although recently he’s been making noises about needing space to store his old textbooks.

Then there are the foreign editions. These are fun to receive and to show off. The covers can be quite unusual, and as for the languages, my books have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Polish, German, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Czech, Portugese and Turkish. Maybe a few others.

Some of those, my mother passes along to her international friends in the ceramics community (she’s a ceramic sculptor – to see her work, Google Sylvia Hyman, or check out my website, www.jacquelinediamond.com). I’ve given a few to friends who speak foreign languages, but mostly I save them, and they do tend to pile up. In fact, they occupy three drawers of a small chest in my bedroom.

These are the problems a writer dreams of having, of course!

International attention is really exciting to me, since I used to live in Italy. I was thrilled when a friend reported seeing one of my books at Heathrow Airport in London. And once I was interviewed via email for a website in Argentina that specializes in books about sheiks and sultans (the interviewer was kind enough to translate my answers into Spanish). In case you haven’t stumbled across this subgenre, sheik books are popular among category romance readers, although the Harlequin American line has become more realistic and isn’t currently featuring them.

What’s a useful gift for an author? How about bookshelves – and maybe an extra room to put them in! Better yet, keep buying our books, because who else are we writing them for?

Hope you receive your heart’s desire for Christmas, Hanukkah or whatever holiday you celebrate!