The Signed Page & Prime Books

When Pat started the fundraiser back in 2008, he would send out books from his own personal library to encourage folks to donate to Heifer International. It didn’t take long for other people to reach out and ask if they could add some books to the library, just to make sure more people had the chance to win something. As authors reached out to offer their own books, a few of them convinced their publishers to get in on the action, and as the fundraiser grew in scope, the Lottery Library has kept pace.

The Signed Page

A few of the publishers contributing to our lottery are triple- (and sometimes quadruple-) threats, one of them being author/publisher/bookstore dude Shawn Speakman. Shawn is the mastermind behind Grim Oak Press and The Signed Page, and both of his ventures fill a really cool niche. When Shawn was diagnosed with cancer, he didn’t have health insurance. You can read about his story at the Grim Oak website, but he fell into small publishing with the outpouring of support from his author friends who all contributed to the Unfettered anthology to raise money to offset his medical bills. Now that he’s recovered, Grim Oak donates a percentage of their sales to charity.

That brings us to Shawn’s other venture–The Signed Page. Like Grim Oak, it was started with one purpose–to distribute signed Terry Brooks novels to his fans who otherwise had no way to get them. Then more authors started signing their books for him, and things sort of exploded. Now, the Washington-based book store is The Place to get signed books from a huge variety of authors, and every year, they send us some lovely signed books to give away to our supporters.

You can see everything The Signed Page donated in our Lottery Library.

Prime Books

Our other publisher has been with us since 2012, when they donated our first palletized shipment of donations. Prime Books saw what we were up to, and contacted us to see if we would be interested in a book donation. We asked them how many they’d like to donate, and they asked us, “How many do you want?” Maria freaked out a little.

In typical midwestern fashion, we didn’t want to burden them, but they talked us into two pallets of books with stories from Stephen King, Scott Lynch, Neil Gaiman, Mary Robinette Kowal, and a whole army of our favorite authors from a wide swath of genres, from science-fiction and fantasy to horror and noir thriller. We were delighted to add so many books with such top-tier writing into our lottery that year, and Prime has donated that much or more every year since.

We are seriously in love with Prime, and it’s always fun to see which authors are in every new shipment we get from them. If you’re interested, take a look at our Lottery Library to see all the books we have from Prime this year.

Tomorrow…we’ll be with our families as the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving. But we’ll be back Friday with some exciting news that might help you with your holiday gift shopping…