I'm an author and I made this library deal

Yesterday I got the idea to borrow a book of mine from a university library. I had written it 5 years ago. I felt lucky and honored that 2 people in total had borrowed and read it. After all, two is a bigger number than zero, right? Before checking with the library, I had the fear that no one would have read it though I secretly hoped that someone would be out there to disprove me. One of the 2 borrowers, probably the second one to borrow the book, was kind enough to use a pencil and make notes on the side, underline certain passages or put other parts in brackets.

He or she was merciless with the marks so I ended up following easily all traces left on almost every page in my book. But I wasn't getting upset. Ok, initially I was but as I kept following the marks from page to page, I suddenly found it to be a very revealing exercise, if not amusing!

And it just opened up my appetite. I visited as many public libraries there are where I live, looking to borrow more copies of my book so that I could trace more of my readers' marks, compare them and possibly detect patterns in their reactions to my writing.

The experience fascinated me. These days you can get instant reviews on your work online but they bore me. When people write reviews they get into 'review mode', which makes it more probable that you will get an idea of what people think about your book but more difficult to get a real sense of how people felt while reading it.

Besides people tend to exaggerate on reviews, others play the whole work down and often for reasons you can't be sure of. But for someone like me who doesn't believe honest reviews exist, seeing how my readers were marking their reactions as they read my book was quite fun.

So I went to propose this deal to the library people. For every copy of my book that gets returned highlighted, underlined or marked in any way, they will notify me by email and put it on hold for me until I happily replace it with a clean copy for the library. Of course, I get to keep the marked copy.

I figured that if my rate of book markings is 1 book every 5 years, it's definitely worth the cost for I get to keep the traces of my readers' reactions. The library people were naturally happy with the deal.

But so was I!

Now I'm debating with myself whether I should contact more libraries around the world that have my book in their stacks and ask for the same deal...so tempted!

http://www.thinkaloo.com