James Patterson is supporting local bookstores again this holiday season.
The Along Came a Spider author, 77, is making sure U.S. booksellers are getting their flowers by gifting $300,000 to 600 bookstore staffers as a part of his holiday bookstore bonus program, according to ABC News.
The 600 people working at bookstores — including Birmingham’s Thank You Books in Alabama, Cedar Falls’ The Nook in Iowa and City Lights Books in San Francisco — are each set to receive a $500 bonus.
Patterson told ABC in a statement through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, he’s happy to support independent bookstores and their staff.
“Booksellers save lives. Period,” Patterson said. “I’m happy to be able to acknowledge them and all their hard work this holiday season.”
“We appreciate Mr. Patterson’s financial generosity as well as his generosity of spirit. We all continue to be awed by, and grateful for, Mr. Patterson’s continuing support of independent booksellers,” Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), said in a statement.
“It means everything to have him recognize and reward the valuable role booksellers play in the industry,” Hill added.
Staffers who are receiving the bonuses this season either applied with an application or were nominated by a coworker, friend or author for their work, according to the ABA.
Among the recepients this year are Davis Gustafson at Thank You Books, Erin Messer at City Lights, Brandon Conrad of The Nook, Gina Marx of The Lynx in Gainesville, Fla., and Kirstin Kraig of Whale’s Tale Books in Lakewood, Colo., per ABC.
Patterson has similarly donated funds to booksellers many times over the past decade. In March this year, the ABA announced that the thriller novelist would be donating another $600,000 to be split among booksellers.
Additionally, in 2020, he made a $500,000 donation to several other independent bookstores —nominated by their customers, owners and employees — across the U.S. as they struggled during the COVID pandemic.
“The White House is concerned about saving the airline industry and big businesses — I get that. But I’m concerned about the survival of independent bookstores, which are at the heart of main streets across the country,” Patterson said in a statement at the time, according to the the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. “I believe that books are essential. They make us kinder, more empathetic human beings. And they have the power to take us away-even momentarily-from feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and scared.”
“I hope that the funds we raise keep bookstores alive at a time when we need them the most,” he added.
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In 2014, Patterson also donated $1 million to bookstores, divvied up into prizes of $15,000 per store.
“It ranges from Andover Bookstore, where a son and daughter wrote and their father hadn’t had a raise since 1988,” he told NPR of the initiative at the time. “Children’s Bookstore in Baltimore, they give books to schools and they want the kids to be able to keep the books. Book Passage out in California will do more book fairs with it. Little Shop of Stories down in Decatur, Ga., they’re buying a bookmobile.”
The Alex Cross author added at the time that he believes the book industry deserves just as much intervention as massive industries like banks and the auto industry, simply because literature and reading is good for our culture.
“The government has stepped in to help banks, automobiles, anything where money is concerned, but nobody seems to care about books and our bookstores,” he added to NPR at the time. “And I’m telling you, American literature is in jeopardy.”
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