Every year, during the week of Thanksgiving, we are frantically finishing our yearly 16-page newsletter, Pig-Tales.  This year we’re not mailing it, choosing instead to go green and make it available on our website and via email.  It seems that no matter when we start the process, things always come to a head during the week of Thanksgiving.
Our process is seemingly simple: choose the best books of the past year, with an emphasis on those from the past six months, for kids and adults. Oh, that’s so much easier said than done. We go through the books we featured on the website, on staff picks shelves, and what our staffers are just loving. Our newsletter is a  glorious excess. At last count we had reviewed over 114 books, and we’re not done yet. Picture if you will, Elizabeth (the only one who can do the graphics), surrounded by piles of books on the couch, not just piles, enormous towering stacks facing our new indulgence, a new monitor big enough that it can’t be comfortably viewed from the desk, so it sits on the coffee table where she works, quite comfortably from the couch. Elizabeth is doing the final run-through. Double-checking and re-checking the staff reviews and placing them with their cover art. It’s a blur of book reviews and covers. Staff members are proofreading pages thought to be done. Edits are being made and while I sleep, so are minute changes in spacing that will make the newsletter read more clearly and smoothly.
Our newsletter is a labor of love and a point of pride. We publish one newsletter a year. Folks count on it to guide their holiday shopping, year after year. Our first newsletter ran four pages, long before the day of just emailing a PDF to the printer. Back then it was a multi-step process that took days before the newsletter could even go to press. Now, it’s an email, a quick proof and the same day we’ll have hundreds available at the store for pick-up and a click away on any computer.
The newsletter is divided into sections: Gift books, Teacher’s corner, then we break up the sections by ages straight through adult fiction and non-fiction.  One thing I love about the newsletter is the chance to herald our favorite books. The books our staff loves. Sometimes we feature different genres — this year, dystopian novels get some special attention. Our graphic novel section has expanded considerably. The Vermont section is always chock full as we have so many talented writers in the Green Mountain State.
One of my favorite aspects of the newsletter is the staff reviews. Every staff member has been sending reviews of their top books for the past year. I love seeing what they highlight and love. Having five people contribute reviews makes our job a lot easier. Plus, there are now seven different voices to be read in our newsletter as each review is attributed. This has a nice long-term consequence as customers will read a review that they particularly like and then they’ll seek out that staffer for help the rest of the year.
While Elizabeth toils at home doing things I could never do, my newsletter job is two-fold: make sure we’ve got all the books in the store that we’re listing (no easy feat with a few titles that seemed to have gone out of stock the minute they made the cut), and to start the co-op ball rolling. This feels too easy compared to the hard, hard work of creating the 16-pager, so I’ve been cooking a lot of hearty mind- and body-sustaining food.
So, we soldier on, trying to meet a deadline that can only be met by the nicest printer in the state of Vermont, who promises a six-hour turnaround on Wednesday. Newsletter time lets us know it’s the holidays and for 13 years people have come to rely on Pig-Tales to guide their holiday choices. Crazy deadlines aside, that makes us feel pretty good.