Finally Friday - Save Our Cozies Readathon

**Nothing to Disclose**

Image courtesy of Franz Chapman/Save Our Cozies readathon

Welcome to my new feature - Finally Friday. These will be posted any Friday that I feel like posting something different. Today's post is about a very important thing to me - the Save Our Cozies group. On July 16th, the group will be doing a readathon to help bring more awareness to cozy mysteries. For more information, you can visit the readathon page here, or join the Facebook group here. I will also be posting on Twitter during the event.

Since the readathon page explains what you need to know about it, I'll be explaining why this cause is important, and what you can do to help. First of all, if you aren't familiar with cozy mysteries, they are the nice, light mysteries. They normally have an amateur sleuth, and little to no gore or sex scenes. The most well known, and probably first, cozy author is Agatha Christie.

Now, the whole reason for this group is because some of the publishers suddenly decided to cut a lot of cozy series. Cozies may not sell as much as some other genres, but the following is very loyal. Save Our Cozies was designed to help fight these cuts by bringing more attention to those awesome series. Some of the more popular series that have been canceled are:
-A Piece of Cake by Jacklyn Brady
-Cheese Shop by Avery Aames
-Betsy Devonshire Needlework by Monica Ferris
-Family Skeleton by Leigh Perry (one of my mom's favorites)
-Bad Hair Day by Nancy Cohen
For more canceled series check out the Save Our Cozies group linked above.

Here are some ways to save your favorite series, whatever the genre, that I have found through the group:

1. The best way to help is to preorder books in your favorite series, or buy during release week. According to authors, those are the most important sales figures that the publishers look at.
2. If you can't afford to buy the books, encourage your library to order them. That initial sale of the book helps boost the numbers, although sadly there is no way for them to count the checkouts towards sales numbers.
3. Leave reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else you can think of. Once Amazon hits a certain amount of reviews on a book, the book is featured more. It also will help sway people who are waiting for reviews before they buy, which can mean higher sales - a total win-win situation. It doesn't even have to be an elaborate review. Mine are always short and straight to the point, and I normally start it out with if I liked it or not since that is the main thing people want to know.
4. The final way to help is to suggest the books to people. On Facebook, on a blog, in person, or however you want, it doesn't matter as long as you get the word out about your favorite books.

Picture courtesy of LuAnn Braley

That is all I have for you today. Just remember that if you want your favorite series to survive, please promote them in any way you can. They really do need all the sales they can get.

~Kelly