Happy times at Eden Mills

One of the first things that we did when we decided to make Bare It For Books official was get in touch with Andrew Simpson, the fabulous director of this year's Eden Mills Writers' Festival. We told him our idea, and asked if it might be possible to use the EMWF as an opportunity to spread the word about our little campaign. Andrew jumped on our bandwagon almost right away and offered us a table along the Publisher's Way. How exciting! How professional!

So Allegra and I got to work planning what we were going to include at our table. Information on the campaign, naturally. A sign-up sheet for our mailing list? Of course. Paper copies of the letters that we'd already begun to send out to authors? Absolutely. 

We also, with the help of our talented designer, Emma Jenkin, were able to cook up some BIFB swag to tote along. Bookmarks! Sexy bookmarks! How awesome is that?

Get lusty for literature, folks. Why not?

:And heck, why not another time? All three slogans now, plus our oh-so-cute Twitterish stickers:

Sexy, sexy bookmarks ...

Needless to say, the fact that we were toting official swag into an official event was pretty exciting. Even more exciting, though, was the response that we received at Eden Mills. So many positive vibes! So many people who instantly got excited about the idea. Plus, we got to meet such luminaries as Ami McKay, Trevor Cole, Angie Abdou and Julie Wilson. It was pretty much a perfect day.

And look! WE HAVE BIFB T-SHIRTS!

Amanda on the left, Allegra on the right. BIFB duo in the flesh.

We had a lot of fun. Many thanks to Andrew Simpson, who so kindly donated a table to our cause. (And put some of our bookmarks to good use.) And thanks to everyone who came out, stopped at our table, and got excited about our little idea..

Here's to more excitement, and many more enthusiastic festivals in the future!. 

How It All Began

Hello world.

Here’s a question for you: have you ever picked up a book, looked at the author photo, and thought: dang, that author’s attractive?

We have. Lots. In fact, we’ve seen so many attractive authors over our time as diehard CanLit reading fans that back in the summer of 2012 we came up with a fun little idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could get some of these attractive authors to pose for a calendar? And wouldn’t it be fun if said calendar was a little risqué, a little sexy? What if we got our authors to pose ... in the nearly-nude? A la Calendar Girls? Would they be up for it? Would the CanLit world be game?

So we put some lists together. We sent out some emails. And what do you know – the CanLit world was more than game for a sexy author calendar. Turns out there are plenty of Canadian writers out there eager to bare it all in the name of literature, especially if PEN Canada is involved as our enthusiastic charity of choice. And just like that, Bare It For Books was born.

Here’s the deal: our calendar will feature 12-13 Canadian authors posing with books, some book-related props ... and nothing else. It will be a 2014 calendar, available for sale in October of 2013. It will be classy. It will be fun. It will be sexy as hell.

The proceeds from the calendar will be donated to PEN Canada. We’ll be launching the Bare It For Books campaign officially this coming January.We’ll also be launching a website at the same time, a website that will track our fundraising progress and include other fun BIFB projects that we’ll be rolling out over the course of 2013.

In the interim, we’ll be using this handy little space to blog about our journey leading up to the campaign launch. We hope you enjoy.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, want to know more about the campaign, or would  like to get involved. Send us an email. Follow us on Twitter. Stalk our blog (we don’t mind. Really).

Show us some literary love, folks, and we’ll show it right back.

Allegra & Amanda