Oprah's Book of the Week: The Bluebird Effect!

Tooty, toot, toot. Rooty, toot, toot. Sometimes I grab my little horn and toot it. This is one of those times.

The Bluebird Effect is Book of the Week at Oprah.com.

As in Oprah's Book Club. My book got the Big Point from the Fickle Finger of Fate.

What is a bird book doing there, in the first place, and what is a bird book written by me doing there?

The gods must be crazy.

Bill's been saying he's the Steadman of Whipple. All four of us went to Bar-B-Cutie in Marietta yesterday and ate a celebratory meal of fried okra. I drank a quarter of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that night, then quit. I'm a cheap date.

I try not to obsess about it, about what it might mean for book sales. I only check its Amazon sales rank about four times a day. That's not neurotic. It had been hovering at around 6,000, and now it's right up around 1,000. Meaning there are only 1,000 other titles selling better than it is. Which feels pretty good, for a book about raising baby hummingbirds and chimney swifts. There are an awful lot of books in this world.

This is pretty arcane stuff, the brass tacks of dealing with orphaned and injured birds. I think it's interesting; most of you think it's interesting, but would the general public?

I wonder. Maybe it's all just bizarre enough to get someone's attention, or maybe it's the 320 paintings and drawings that did it. Maybe it's the insanely beautiful production Houghton Mifflin Harcourt lavished on it.

Maybe it's just luck.

I think about it all as I grub in the dirt, pulling creeping Charlie off my asparagus shoots and throwing wads of weeds over my shoulder. I wonder if I may have written and illustrated a book that will sell well at long last.

 A book that has crossover potential from the usual suspects (birders and nature enthusiasts) to Oprah's Book Club people. I know that Letters from Eden has that potential, but Oprah didn't bite when my publicist, Taryn Roeder, sent it last time.

I'm just grateful, that's all.

Fielding pre-order requests at the Midwest Birding Symposium in September, 2011. Finally got them all sent out!

All it makes me want to do is write more, and that's the best feeling of all.

If y'all want to go over to Oprah's Book Club page and leave a salient comment, I'd be much obliged. Don't worry. They don't send you a bunch of emailed stuff when you register.  As always, nice reviews on the Amazon page for The Bluebird Effect help, too. There's a lady who docked it a star because one of the chapters is about ivory-billed woodpeckers, and everyone knows they're extinct!  Hmmph. And another lady who said, "If you want my opinion, her husband is a saint to put up with it all!"

Well, howdy-doo to you, too.

That's not neurotic, to worry about that stuff, right? Whoops, slipped to 1,500. All right. I'm going to go pull some weeds, plant some peas. Uniform: Round House overalls, workboots and a sports bra. It's a look. And no, there are no pictures of it.

As always, you can hit the order buttons on the right sidebar if you want to buy a book personalized by me. I can't meet Amazon's prices, and I don't even try. As long as you have the book, I don't mind where you got it. It just makes me happy that you like it. I'm thankful for your patronage, thankful for this wonderful life lived amongst birds. The blue-gray gnatcatchers got in today, and a yellow-throated warbler was singing from a creek valley as I drove home. It's all beginning again.