No more catalogs for you!

Eric Wilson of the New York Times made me very happy. Wilson wrote today ('Deforest Your Mailbox') on a new online service called Catalog Choice that helps people to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings they receive to their mailbox. And no less important - this service is free of charge!

Any news about an attempt to reduce the amount of catalogs sent to people's mailboxes is great news. Every year 19,000,000,000 (yes, 19 billion!) catalogs are mailed in the US. According to Catalog Choice's website, over eight million tons of trees are consumed each year in the production of these catalogs. Take into consideration the fact that most of the catalogs go directly to the trash bin (or recycling bin in the best case scenario), and you've got pure waste of natural resources.

Catalog Choice is according to the site "a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. It is endorsed by the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and funded by the Overbrook Foundation, the Merck Family Fund, and the Kendeda Fund." Its mission, besides reduction of the number of the mailed catalogs, is to "promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. We aim to accomplish this by freely providing the Catalog Choice services to both consumers and businesses."

I tried it and it's a very easy and user-friendly process. You register yourself and then can indicate which catalogs you no longer wish to receive. Afterwards, they update the businesses with the list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs.

I like Catalog Choice as it creates a win-win-win situation: Customers benefit from reducing their junk mail at no charge, the companies benefit since they save money by not sending catalogs for customers that don't wish to receive them, and of course the environment benefit due to all the trees that won't cut down.

You are welcome to check it out. According to their website, 29,726 people already registered to the site, having opted out of over 103,490 catalogs. And they're online only since last Wednesday!

And last word - if you want to stop receiving any kind of junk mail, check out other services available like one of my favorite sites, GreenDimes.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Harmonious Environment – A Green Author's Self-Publishing Success

I'm in touch all the time with authors and wanna-be-authors and hear quite often stories about the challenges and difficulties of getting your work out there. Some decide to self-publish, and then of course need to address the distribution and marketing part as well. Many struggle. That's why I took special notice when I read on Norma Lehmeier Hartie 's blog that her book, titled “Harmonious Environment” is the new grand prize winner of the “15th Annual Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.”

So what makes a green, conscious, self-publishing success? An interview was in order!

Q: Norma, what is the most unique thing about your book?

The variety of subjects found in one book.

Part I explores how to get rid of the negative energies in the environment, which includes the toxic products in homes and how to remove unseen negative energy. It includes information on natural and organic food with recipes and natural body care products.

Part II teaches how to trust intuition to create a beautiful home that vibrates with loving, positive energy and how discover how to manifest your dreams and aspirations.

Part III serves as the confidence booster for those who may still be shy about their undeveloped talents as a designer. The section also pulls together the entire book for a greater understanding of how all the principles in the book are interconnected.

Part IV lists hundreds of resources to help make a harmonious environment.

Q: Who is your book aimed at?

The Cultural Creatives who are roughly one-third of the American population.

Cultural Creatives are those who:

• Love nature and are concerned about its well-being.

• Care about both psychological and spiritual development.

• Want to be involved in creating a new and better way of life in our country.

• Are concerned about what the big corporations are doing in the name of making more profits.

• Are seekers of knowledge and information.

• Are authentic.

Q: Who would benefit most by reading it?

Anyone who wants to improve their life and/or the health of the planet.

Q: What do you think appealed most in your book to the judges in the contest?

I only have one judge’s critique so far, and this is what he wrote:

"This is a beautiful looking, very well organized and thoughtfully written book. The author obviously has thoroughly done the necessary study/homework as she writes with an authentic voice, one of experience. The cover is especially lovely, evenly designed and inviting to the potential reader to open the book and go further. In reading we can only be inspired to beautify our lives, make the necessary changes that would make us happier, healthier, more at peace—on a personal, group, community or global level. I found myself drawn in to clean out my cluttered basement and give things away, as well as to get out my pendulum again for special use, and to be more conscientious about my cleaning products or home purchases. The benefits for clearing out, cleaning, and adjusting energy are explained succinctly and reasonably, and these tips are therefore encouraging and convincing. A lovely book to keep and refer to often. So many answers therein – if lots of people would accept this wonderful holistic approach."

Q: Tell us a little bit about the process you went through in order to
self-publish this book? Did you chose it or did you try and interest
publishers first? How long did it take?

I first tried to get an agent and then a publisher. In hindsight, I sent out proposal too early, as book was not fully developed. I read The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Tom and Marilyn Ross and The Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter and decided to do it myself. If you are considering self-publishing, these are must-read books! From editing to finished book, it took about 5 months.

Q: Many of our readers are authors or aspiring authors, and self publishing is obviously on their mind. What was the most difficult part of self-publishing?

The painstaking process of reviewing edits and accepting/deleting them.

Q: What was the most fun part?

Seeing the book for the first time…Seeing the book for the first time in Barnes & Noble.

Q: Is self-publishing worth it from your experience?

I cannot imagine not having (self)-published. It was definitely worth it.

Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages that you experienced?

The chief advantage I experienced was the freedom to create my own cover and interior and decide on what got edited. When you self-publish, you are the boss. Disadvantage is money has to be spent before any books are sold.

Q: Who did you work with to accomplish it all?

I hired an editor, book designer, book producer (printer), a librarian for the cataloging-in-publication data and a POD printer for galleys.

Q: Did you take any special "Harmonious" steps in the book publication?

I printed on partly recycled paper and used non-toxic ink. Most of the writing was done on computer with little printing of paper.

Q: Many excellent books are self-published, but only a handful get the notice they deserve. Do you have any tips to our readers who aspiring self-published green/conscious authors on how to bring their book to the publics' attention?

Through the media—get reviews, quotes in articles, write articles. Write a blog and post on other’s blogs. Become a speaker. Sign books/talk in bookstores, libraries or anywhere else you can. Join appropriate yahoo groups and contribute. Read books on publicity and public relations for new ideas. Join Yahoo’s Self-Publishing Group for support and to learn about the business.

Norma will be will be teaching a self-publishing workshop on December 1st at 1:00 at the Hendrick Hudson library in Montrose, New York.

Eylon @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Blog Action Day - the day after

It seems that the Blog Action Day went really well yesterday. Thousands of bloggers wrote green posts and for one day it seemed like everybody is talking only about the environment (at least on the blogosphere..).

Some of the bloggers wrote their environmental post yesterday on Eco-Libris, and I would like to thank all of them for presenting Eco-Libris to their readers. You are welcome to check their websites as well:

1. Em's bookshelf - Blog Action Day and Eco-Libris
2. Makeup Minute - Plant A Tree With Every Makeup Book Read With Eco-Libris
3. Mommy talks, Wife Stories, Girl Speak - Today is Blog Action Day!
4. Linuxchic.net - Blog Action Day: Read, recycle, replant
5. Classroom 2.0 - Read a book! Plant a tree!
6. A side of cartoons..Please - Adaptations (and thank you Robbay for the great cartoon!)
7. A Writer's Words, An Editor's Eye - Blog Action Day: Publishing and the Environment

So, thank you all of you for taking the time and writing on us. We will continue to work hard to move everyone towards sustainable reading!

Yours,
Raz

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Paying developing countries to protect their forests - Blog Action Day

Greetings for all the blogs that are participating today in the Blog Action Day! This is a very important day and I hope it will generate a powerful green voice that will help us all move in the right direction. I would like to contribute to this day a post on very good news I read during the weekend on Planet Ark. They published a story from Reuters on a new fund initiated by the World Bank that is aimed to pay developing countries for protecting and replanting their forests.

The idea is very simple - paying developing countries money for protecting their forests will give them an economic incentive to preserve them and fight deforestation. If you make conservation more worthwhile than logging to the governments and the local communities in these areas, it should keep these precious trees alive. Less deforestation = les greenhouse gas emissions.

The logic is also very clear - deforestation contributes 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions, which is, as they remind in the article, more than all the world's cars, trucks, trains and airplanes together! And as the world bank sees it - less deforestation = less greenhouse gas emissions.

The development of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), as the new fund is called will depends on the global agreement that will take effect after Kyoto Protocol will expire in 2012. In the meantime, the article reports that there will be some testing of the concept in 3-5 countries to check how well it works in real life.

I think that all in all it's a good idea and with no economic value to the forests, it will be very difficult to save them from logging. It's also important to make sure that this funding will be spent wisely and that the governments will collaborate and share it with local communities that live in these areas. Their participation and support is critical to the success of this mechanism.

In any case, we still have to remember that this is only a temporary solution. A sustainable solution will have to include also the demand side and ensure that consumers in the developed world will consume alternatives for logging products. For example, recycled paper instead of virgin paper. Only then, when demand will fall, we'll be able to secure the future of the forests and the future of this planet.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!

Last day for "Hotter than I Should Be" t-shirts auction

Do you want a cool (or hot, depends how you look at it..) t-shirt with the signature of Scarlett Johansson or Orlando Bloom and benefit the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) at the same time?

So if the answer is YES, you still have time to participate in a special auction in eBay of "Hotter than I Should Be" t-shirts, made of 100 percent organic cotton and signed by celebrities. 100% of the proceeds will be donated to WWF's global conservation initiatives including fighting threats like climate change.

So who are the celebrities that participate in the in the special auction organized by WWF? Scarlett Johansson (2 shirts!), Orlando Bloom, Rachael Ray, Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Oliver Stone, Tobey Maguire, Candice Bergen, Gisele Bündchen (2 shirts!), Kevin Bacon, Paul Newman (2 shirts!), Martin Short, Charlie Sheen, Cindy Crawford, Betty White (2 shirts!) and Susan Sarandon (2 shirts!).

Right now, the most desired shirt is the one with Orlando Bloom's signature ($1,150) and the cheapest one you can get is with Martin Short's signature ($123.36).

If you are interested, hurry up as the auction will end today (Oct 12). For more details and links to all the shirts' auction pages, check out this eBay page.

Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

2007 People's Choice Award - summary

4 days have left to those of you who haven't chose yet their favorite nominee and went to Co-op America website to vote for the 2007 People's Choice Award for the Green Business of the Year.

We have covered in the last two weeks the ten nominees for the award, and I want to say that all of them are deserved to be the green business of the year. I think that this list of nominees is more than all a milestone that shows us how much the area of green biz has developed in the last couple of years. I'm sure that the competition on the award will get even tougher in the near future when more new innovative green businesses (did someone just said Eco-Libris? :-) will join the list, already packed with thousands of successful and pioneering green businesses.

The winner will be announced at the Green Festival in San Francisco on November 10. You can also sign up for our e-mail newsletter to receive the announcement of the winner.

If you missed any of the the parts of the Unofficial Guide we published so far on Eco-Libris blog, please check them out:

Introduction
Part 1 - Natural Pet Home Store
Part 2- Mountains of the Moon
Part 3 - Yoga Nine
Part 4 - Pizza Fusion
Part 5 - Green Living Now
Part 6 - ReusableBags.com
Part 7 - UsedCardboardBoxes.com
Part 8 - Flexcar
Part 9 - Manitoba Harvest
Part 10 - Greenfeet.com

Yours,
Raz

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for everybook you read!

Oprah's book club selection - Love in the Time of Cholera

I was very happy to read two days ago in the New York Times that Oprah Winfrey has picked “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as her next book club selection.

Garcia Marquez is one of my favorite writers and I one of the greatest storytellers ever. I hope that this selection by the most influential book club in the U.S. will expose more people to his great work.

I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but a film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera” is scheduled for November release. In any case, I join Oprah Winfrey who said in the article “If you’re like me, you’ll want to read the book before you see the movie.” Winfrey also suggested book clubs could hold their next meeting at the movie theater.

MSNBC.com reported that Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Random House Inc., announced a new printing of 750,000 copies for the novel, and an additional 30,000 for the original Spanish-language text.

I know that Random House, which is a leading U.S. publisher, announced in 2006 that it will raise the proportion of recycled paper it uses to at least 30% by 2010 from under 3% at the time of the announcement. Still, I am quite sure that a lot of virgin paper will be used for all these new copies.

Therefore, those of you who will buy new copies of the book (libraries or a used copy are also great options to get a hold of the book) are welcome to balance them out by planting trees with Eco-Libris. "Love in the Time of Cholera" is really a great book and can be a great opportunity to start taking action and making our reading habit more sustainable. I'm sure Oprah wouldn't mind that :-)

Yours,

Raz

Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!