Readers sell books.

I know this to be true because it’s true of me. I have bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of books that were recommended to me personally by someone I know.

With the bloom of book blogging, this circle of “someone I know” has expanded into the out-there-o-sphere, to include people whose websites I am familiar with.

Some of the publishers have picked up on the Book Blogging trend, come to respect the opinions and thoughts of book bloggers and have even put blurbs on the backs of covers! Like Little Red Reviewer’s blurb printed right there in broad daylight on the backside of King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence. Or nrlymrtl’s blurb for Shadow of the Sun by Barbara Friend Ish inside the second printed edition.

But why shouldn’t book stores also benefit from the hard work that all you rabid book bloggers put into your reviews?

Case in point. I caught this review of A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason from Jo Walton published on the grandaddy of book blogs, Tor.com.

I went out and bought the book, as well as Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle, also mentioned in the review.

(I didn’t buy the cat. She’s already installed in our house.)

So, The Book Room, used books in Charlottesville, directly benefited from the Tor.com review.

Little Red Reviewer and I put together http://bookstorebloggerconxn.com/ to start cataloging book blogger review blurbs by title and author.

We need your book blurbs and your permission to use them!

There’s an easy form for you to use, under I’m a Book Blogger. We’ll go and index these blurbs under the Books! page.

Maybe the bookstores will pick up on the idea, maybe they won’t. Hopefully they will. But at least it will be a ginormously ginormous huge indexed database of blurbs for our favorite genre!