Tag Archives ⇒ content

More coming in from this weekend’s workshop

February 24, 2009
· Martin Kelley

Both of my work­shop co-leaders Wess and Robin have now checked in with pre­lim­i­nary reports. More mate­r­i­al is being col­lect­ed on the Quak­erQuak­er event page.

Wess and I have both been upload­ing lots of pho­tos to Flickr using the “quakerreclaiming2009″ tag. I’ve been upload­ing my video inter­views both on Youtube and Quak­erQuak­er. You can see them at the reclaiming2009 tag (I have the feel­ing we’ve just dou­bled the Quak­er con­tent on Youtube but it’s not that extreme). Any­one present with more pho­tos can either upload them to Flickr with the “quakerreclaiming2009” tag or send them direct­ly up to Quak­erQuak­er. Same with videos.

SEO Myths II: Content Content Content, the Secret to SEO

February 27, 2007
· Martin Kelley

When­ev­er
I talk with fel­low web design­ers, the issue of “SEO” invari­ably comes
up. That’s techie slang for “search engine opti­miza­tion,” of course,
that black sci­ence of mak­ing sure Google lists your site high­er than
your com­peti­tors. Over the years a small army of shady char­ac­ters have
tried to game the search engine results.

I’ve always thought such tricks were pathet­ic and bound to lose over
the long term. Search engines want to fea­ture good sites. It’s in their
best inter­est to make sure the sites list­ed are the ones peo­ple want to
see. A search engine that returns unsat­is­fac­to­ry results quickly
becomes a has-been in the search engine com­pe­ti­tion. So as soon as a
site such as Google notices some new SEO trick is skew­ing the rank­ings they tweak their secret search algo­rithm to fix the SEO loop­hole.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In the­o­ry it’s easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and
the oth­er big search engines hap­py: give poten­tial vis­i­tors site
they’ll want to vis­it. For­get the tricks and spend your time putting
togeth­er an amaz­ing site. Search engines like text, so write, write,
write. 

I’m look­ing to join a web design house, which means I’ve been
inter­view­ing with slick web devel­op­ers late­ly and when­ev­er they ask me
the best way to increase SEO for their
clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I’m an idiot
but it’s absolute­ly true: two blog posts a week will end up being over
100 pages of pure con­tent. All of these sites full of Flash animation
get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web sys­tem can achieve many
of the same results – blogs are just the eas­i­est way yet to get content
on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to peo­ple about start­ing a cor­po­rate blog they quickly
start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Hum­bug – your
com­pa­ny’s life is prob­a­bly already filled with blog­gable material! 

I used to work in a book­store where I did most of the customer
ser­vice, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I’d get a
par­tic­u­lar­ly intrigu­ing query and would spend a lit­tle time researching
an answer (most­ly by look­ing through the index­es of our books and
search­ing the arcane sites of our niche). This research did­n’t always
pan out to a book sale, but it marked our book­store as a place to get
answers and gave us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over Ama­zon and its ilk.
Each of my email answers could have eas­i­ly been refor­mat­ted to become a
blog post. By the end of a year, I’m sure the vol­ume com­ing from these
obscure search­es would be quite high (see yes­ter­day’s Long Tail Strategy
post on the Hit­Tail blog for an account of how atten­tion to search
engine’s one-hit-wonders helped achieve a wide­spread key­word dominance).

When­ev­er some­thing new hap­pens that breaks you out of your routine,
think about whether it’s blog­gable. At the book­store, a new book would
come in and we’d spend ten min­utes talk­ing about it. That conversation
reached half-a-dozen peo­ple at most. In that same ten min­utes we could
have writ­ten up a blog post say­ing much the same thing.

Last Spring a con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle appeared in the local newspaper
that tan­gen­tial­ly involved my employ­er. That morn­ing my workmates
gath­ered togeth­er in the recep­tion area for the bet­ter part of an hour
trad­ing opin­ions and wise­cracks. After about five min­utes of this, I
slipped back to my office and wrote my opin­ions and wise­cracks down
into my blog. I hit post and came back to the recep­tion area – to find my
work­mates still blath­er­ing on, natch. My post reached hun­dreds and took
no more time out of the work day than the recep­tion pontifications.

Humans are social ani­mals. We’re always blog­ging. It’s just that
most of the time we’re doing it ver­bal­ly around the water cool­er with
three oth­er peo­ple. Learn to type it in and you’ve got your­self a
high-volume blog that will add invalu­able con­tent and SEO mag­ic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Last­ly, a point to web­mas­ters: it usu­al­ly pays to think about ways
to re-package your con­tent. My most recent­ly expe­ri­ence of this was
tag­i­fy­ing my per­son­al blog over at “Quak​er​Ran​ter​.org.” Every time I
post there a Mov­able Type plu­g­in fish­es out the key words in the
arti­cle and lists them after­wards as tags. These tags are all linked in
such a way that results send the term through the site’s search engine
to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I’ve used
that term.

Tags are like cat­e­gories except they pick up every­thing we talk
about (when we use them aggres­sive­ly at least, and espe­cial­ly when we
auto­mate them). We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know the cat­e­gories that our
poten­tial audi­ence might be search­ing for and tag­i­fy­ing our sites
increas­es our key­word out­reach expo­nen­tial­ly. My per­son­al blog has 239
entries but 3,860 pages accord­ing to Google.
It’s the parsed out and re-packaged con­tent that accounts for all of
this extra vol­ume. This does­n’t increase traf­fic by that near­ly that
much, but last month about 30% of my Google vis­its came from these tag
index­es. More on the mechan­ics of this on my post about the tag­ging.

Creating an RSS feed from scratch

February 26, 2007
· Martin Kelley

RSS feeds
are the lin­gua fran­ca of the mod­ern inter­net, the glue that binds
togeth­er the hun­dreds of ser­vices that make up “Web 2.0.” The term
stands for “Real­ly Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion” and can be thought of as a
machine-code table of con­tents to a web­site. An RSS feed
for a blog will typ­i­cal­ly list the last dozen-or-so arti­cles, with the
title, date, sum­ma­ry and con­tent all laid out in spe­cial fields. Once
you have a web­site’s RSS feed you can syn­di­cate, or re-publish, its con­tents by email, RSS read­er
or as a side­bar on anoth­er web­site. This post will show you a
ridicu­lous­ly easy way to “roll your own” RSS feed with­out hav­ing to
wor­ry about your web­site’s con­tent platform.

Just about every native Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions comes built-in with mul­ti­ple RSS feeds.
But in the real world, web­sites are built using an almost-infinite
num­ber of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems and web devel­op­ment software
pro­grams. Some­times a sin­gle web­site will use dif­fer­ent pro­grams for
putting its con­tents online and some­times a sin­gle orga­ni­za­tion spreads
its func­tions over mul­ti­ple domains.

Step 1: Make it Del​.icio​.us

To begin, sign up with Del​.icio​.us,
the pop­u­lar “social book­mark­ing” web ser­vice (sim­i­lar ser­vices can be
eas­i­ly adapt­ed to work). Then add a “post to Del​.icio​.us” but­ton to
your browser’s tool­bar fol­low­ing the instruc­tions here.
Now when­ev­er you put new con­tent up on your site, go that new page,
click on your “post to Del​.icio​.us” but­ton and fill out a good title
and descrip­tion. Choose a tag to use. A tag is sim­ply a cat­e­go­ry and
you can make it what­ev­er you want but “mysites” or your busi­ness name
will be the eas­i­est to remem­ber. Hit save and you’ve start­ed an RSS feed.

How? Well, Del​.icio​.us turns each tag into a RSS feed.
You can see it in all its machine code glo­ry at
del​.icio​.us/​r​s​s​/​u​s​e​r​n​a​m​e​/​m​y​s​i​tes (replac­ing “user­name” with your
user­name and “mysites” with what­ev­er tag you chose).

Now you could just adver­tise that Del​.icio​.us RSS feed
to your audi­ence but there are a few prob­lems doing this. One is that
Del​.icio​.us accounts are usu­al­ly per­son­al. If your web­mas­ter leaves,
then your pub­lished RSS feed will need to
change. Not a good sce­nario, espe­cial­ly since you won’t even be able to
tell who’s still using that old feed. Before you adver­tise your feed
you should “future proof” it by run­ning it through Feedburner.

Cloak that Feed

Go to Feed​burn​er​.com. Right there on the home­page they invite you to type in a URL.
Enter your Del​.icio​.us feed’s address and sign up for a Feedburner
account. In the field next to feed address give it some sen­si­ble name
relat­ing to your com­pa­ny or site, let’s say “mycompa­ny” for our
exam­ple. You’ll now have a new RSS feed at
feeds​.feed​burn​er​.com/​m​y​c​o​m​p​any. Now you’re in busi­ness: this is the
feed you adver­tise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from with­in Feed­burn­er and no one need know.

The default title of your Feed­burn­er feed will still show it’s
Del​.icio​.us roots (and the web­mas­ter’s user­name). To clear that out, go
into Feed­burn­er’s “Opti­mize” tab and turn on the “Title/Description
Burn­er,” fill­ing it out with a title and descrip­tion that better
match­es your feed’s pur­pose. For an exam­ple of all this in action, the
Del​.icio​.us feed that pow­ers my tech link blog and its Feed­burn­er “cloak” can be found here:

Get that Feed out there

Under Feed­burn­er’s “Pub­li­cize” tag there are lots of neat features
to repub­lish your feed your­self. First off is the “Chick­let chooser”
which will give you that ubiq­ui­tous RSS feed
icon to let vis­i­tors know you’ve entered the 21st Cen­tu­ry. Their “Buzz
Boost” fea­ture lets you cre­ate a snip­pet of code for your home­page that
will list the lat­est addi­tions. “Email sub­scrip­tions” lets your
audi­ence sign up for auto­mat­ic emails when­ev­er you add some­thing to
your site.

Final Thoughts

RSS feeds are great ways of communicating
excit­ing news to your audi­ences. If you’re lucky, impor­tant blog­gers in
your audi­ence will sub­scribe to your feed and spread your news to their
net­works. Cre­at­ing a feed through a book­mark­ing ser­vice allows you to
add any page on any site regard­less of its under­ly­ing structure.

SEO Myths I: Analyze This

January 22, 2007
· Martin Kelley

Every web design­er under the sun talks about search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), but it amazes me to see how often basic prin­ci­ples are ignored. I’m in-between jobs right now, which means I’m spend­ing a lot of time look­ing at poten­tial employ­ers’ web­sites. I’ve decid­ed to start a series of posts on SEO myths and real­i­ties that will talk about design­ing for max­i­mum visibility.

I’m not going to focus on any of the under­hand­ed tricks to fool search engines into list­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate page. Google hates this kind of tac­tic and so do I. You get vis­its for hav­ing good con­tent. Good search rank­ings are based on good con­tent and the best way to boost your con­tent is to present your page in a way that lets both humans and search engines find the con­tent they want. Part one is on web­site analy­sis and tracking.

Don’t assume that your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate. One of the neat­est things about the web is that we have instant feed­back on use. With just a lit­tle track­ing we can see what pages peo­ple are look­ing at, how they’re find­ing our site and what they’re doing once they’re here.

Javascript Trackers:

My most advanced sites are cur­rent­ly using four dif­fer­ent track­ing meth­ods. Most uti­lize javascript “bugs,” tiny snip­pets of code that send indi­vid­ual results to an advanced soft­ware track­ing sys­tem. I put the code inside a Move­able Type “Mod­ules Tem­plate” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly import­ed to all pages. Installing a new sys­tem is as easy as cutting-and-pasting the javascript into the Tem­plate and rebuild­ing the site.

  • AXS Vis­i­tors Track­ing System
    This soft­ware installs on your serv­er but don’t let that scare you: this is one of the eas­i­est instal­la­tions I’ve ever seen. AXS gives you great charts of usage: you can nar­row it spe­cif­ic pages on your site, or even par­tic­u­lar search engines or search phrases.
    There’s also a option to view the lastest traf­fic by vis­i­tor. I love watch­ing this! You can see how indi­vid­u­als are using the site and where they’re nav­i­gat­ing. I’ve been able to iden­ti­fy dif­fer­ent types of vis­i­tors this way and under­stand the com­plex­i­ty of the audience.
    It does­n’t seem like AXS is not being devel­oped any­more. The lat­est sta­ble ver­sion came out over two years go, which is a shame.

  • Hit­Tail
    This ser­vice watch­es search-engine links and makes rec­om­men­da­tions for new key­words. I wrote about this ser­vice yes­ter­day in Blog­ging for the Long Tail.

  • Reeferss​.com
    This is a sim­ple sim­ple bit of soft­ware. Like every oth­er track­ing sys­tem it keeps track of refer­rers: search engines and web­sites that bring traf­fic to your site. But unlike the oth­ers that’s all it does. Why care then? It pro­vides a real-time RSS feed of these vis­i­tors. I bring the feed into my “Netvibes” page (a cus­tomized start page, see below) and scan the results mul­ti­ple times a day.

  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
    The inter­net’s gate­keep­er bought the Urchin ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny in April 2005 and relaunched the prod­uct as Google Ana­lyt­ics short­ly there­after. This is becom­ing an essen­tial track­er. It’s free and it’s pow­er­ful, though I haven’t been as impressed by it as oth­ers have. See its Wiki page for more.

Internet Trackers:

It’s easy to find out what peo­ple are say­ing about you online.

  • Tech­no­rati
    This ser­vice tracks blogs but you don’t need to have a blog to use it, for Tech­no­rati will tell you where blogs are link­ing. Give it your URLs (or those of your com­peti­tors!) and you’ll know when­ev­er a blog­ger puts in a link to you. You can also give it key­words and find out when a blog uses them.

  • Google Blog Search
    Google can also let you fol­low blog ref­er­ences or key­word men­tions on the blogs. Google will also track beyond blogs of course. Type “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the main Google search page and you’ll see who’s link­ing to your site (or to the com­pe­ti­tion). There are lots of oth­er ser­vices that track blogs and men­tions – Sphere, Blog­lines, etc. They all have dif­fer­ent strengths so try them and see what you think.

  • Feed­burn­er
    The best RSS mas­sager has always focused on ways to track your RSS feed. They’ve recent­ly intro­duced page track­ing soft­ware too. It looks great but I just installed it this week. I still have to see if it’s as good as Feed­burn­er’s oth­er offerings.

Keeping on top of this flow of data:

It’s easy to get over­whelmed by all of this infor­ma­tion. Most of the track­ing ser­vices pro­vide RSS feeds (See The Won­ders of RSS Feeds for an intro). I use Netvibes, a cus­tomized start page, to pull these all togeth­er into a sin­gle page that I can scan every morn­ing. Here’s a screen­shot of part of my Netvibes track­ing page – the full page cur­rent­ly shows four­teen track­ing feeds on one screen:

So why is tracking important to SEO?

With track­ing you find out what peo­ple are look­ing for on the inter­net. This helps you cre­ate pages and ser­vices that peo­ple will want to find. You might be sur­prised to see what they’re already find­ing on your site. Some examples:

  • Ana­lyz­ing one site, I noticed that few pages I thought were obscure were bring­ing in high Google traf­fic. I looked at these pages again and real­ized they did a good job of describ­ing the com­pa­ny’s mis­sion. I con­se­quent­ly redesigned the site home­page to fea­ture them and I made sure that those pages con­tained direct links to its most impor­tant services.

  • When I start­ed work for anoth­er client I looked at their site and sus­pect­ed that they’re most impor­tant arti­cles were not being seen – vis­i­tors had to click through about four times to get to them. Six months of track­ing con­firmed my hunch and gave me the hard data to con­vince the exec­u­tive direc­tor that we made some small mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the design. Hav­ing this strong con­tent linked right off the home­page helped bring in Google traffic.

Tweaking the blogs for hyperlocal content

September 4, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Inter­est­ing arti­cle over the Move­able­type blog. Anil Dash inter­views George John­son Jr of Hyper­local Media, who’s using MT as a con­tent sys­tem to build hyper­local com­mu­ni­ty sites that can com­pete against local news­pa­pers (see their very-cool look­ing Buf­faloRis­ing site). 

Here’s some of what John­son has to say:

Dis­tri­b­u­tion, con­tent cre­ation, and the abil­i­ty to more
eas­i­ly com­pete with estab­lished local play­ers online… blog­ging is
per­fect for that. I mean a blog is chrono­log­i­cal­ly arranged, in
columns, divid­ed by cat­e­gories and changes (in many cas­es) everyday.
That’s the broad def­i­n­i­tion of a news­pa­per, right? A blog is so much
more than that, but the basic struc­ture lends itself very well to
devel­op­ing an online com­peti­tor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I fol­lowed Brad Choate’s instruc­tions for using Move­able Type as a whole-site con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem.
What start­ed as an exper­i­ment became a way of life for me. The MT
inter­face lends itself so well to con­tent man­age­ment that I’m now using
it for my non-techie clients: Quak​er​song​.org and Quak​ery​outh​.org
are both put togeth­er by MT and I’ve been sur­prised that there’s been
almost no learn­ing curve for the clien­t’s adop­tion of this software. 

Giv­en this, it seems odd that the kids at Move­able Type haven’t
tak­en MT in this direc­tion (even more sur­pris­ing since they hired Brad
him­self a few years ago!). I see a big mar­ket in my niche sites for
this sort of func­tion­al­i­ty and three years lat­er I’m still hav­ing to
tweak tem­plates to get this to work. Anil, what’s up? If Dru­pal had bet­ter doc­u­men­ta­tion and smoother instal­la­tion it would have been the brawn behind Mar​tinKel​ley​.com.

It would be fun to fol­low Until Mon­day’s exam­ple and cre­ate a
hyper­local site (hint hint to VW if she’s read­ing this). Of course,
local­i­ty is not just geographically-based any­more. Quak​erquak​er​.org is a local por­tal of a dif­fer­ent kind. I’m a big believ­er that the hyper­local­i­ty of niche and geo­graph­ic sites are the cut­ting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There’s a lot of pio­neer­ing to be done in this regards. The net has
a lot of pow­er to take down cul­ture monop­o­lies by con­fronting old boy
net­works and business-as-usual think­ing with inno­v­a­tive social networks
that har­ness the tal­ents of the out­siders. The smart newspapers,
mag­a­zines, church­es and cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tions will come on board and
leap-frog them­selves to twenty-first cen­tu­ry rel­e­vance. Too many of the
Philadel­phia (and/or) Quak­er insti­tu­tions I know respond to change by
shuf­fling job titles and putting blind­ers up against rec­og­niz­ing the
ever-narrower demo­graph­ic they serve. 

Reading John Woolman 1: The Public Life of a Private Man

August 7, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Read­ing John Wool­man Series:
1: The Pub­lic Life of a Pri­vate Man
2: The Last Safe Quaker
3: The Iso­lat­ed Saint

I’ve final­ly done it. I’ve read John Woolman’s Jour­nal. Here I’ve been an activist among Quak­ers for almost two decades and I’ve read one of our Big Books.

I have tried before. Many’s the time over the years where I cracked open Moulton’s edi­tion to set­tle myself down. Chap­ter one read, chap­ter two read. Then to chap­ter three, open­ing with:

About this time, believ­ing it good for me to set­tle, and think­ing seri­ous­ly about a com­pan­ion, my heart was turned to the Lord with desires that He would give me wis­dom to pro­ceed there­in agree­ably to His will, and He was pleased to give me a well-inclined damsel, Sarah Ellis, to whom I was mar­ried the 18th of Eighth Month, 1749.

And that’s it. One run-on sen­tence about court­ing and mar­ry­ing his wife. I always put the book down here. I tuck a book­mark in with all good inten­tions of con­tin­u­ing after din­ner. But the book sits on the cof­fee table till a week or so goes by, where­upon it’s moved to the library area for a month or so until it’s final­ly reshelved. The book­marks stays put until a year or two pass­es and I re-start the Jour­nal with renewed determination.

I know why the sen­tence stops me. Through­out my twen­ties and ear­ly thir­ties a lot of my emo­tion­al ener­gy was drained in the (most­ly Quak­er) dat­ing scene. In the­o­ry I thought it a good time “for me to set­tle” and would have been quite con­tent with a “well-inclined damsel.” But the chaos of my per­son­al fam­i­ly his­to­ry com­bined with the casu­al dat­ing cul­ture com­bined to keep me dis­tract­ed with the largely-manufactured dra­ma of rela­tion­ship roller-coasters. For bet­ter or worse, if and when I ever write a jour­nal I will have to find a way to talk about the ways this dat­ing era both fed and stunt­ed my spir­i­tu­al growth.

One of the les­son I learned back in the ear­ly 90s when I was edi­tor at New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers was that I should pay atten­tion when I put a man­u­script or book down. The temp­ta­tion is to chalk it up to tired­ness or a busy life but I found there was usu­al­ly some­thing going on in the text itself that caused me to drop it. When I picked the man­u­script back up and re-read the pas­sages on either side of my aban­doned book­mark, I found some sort of shift of tone that weak­ened the book.

I appre­ci­ate that Quak­er jour­nals are not racy mem­oirs; they have a spe­cif­ic reli­gious edu­ca­tion pur­pose. But I think it’s nat­ur­al to look to them for clues about how to live our lives. Samuel Bow­nas talks a bit about his engage­ment and David Fer­ris turns meet­ing his future wife into quite a humor­ous sto­ry. Per­haps Wool­man was such a saint­ly aes­thete that Sarah was sim­ply pre­sent­ed to him with no futher ques­tions. But still, there’s a lev­el of pri­va­cy in Woolman’s writ­ings that sep­a­rates him from us; I’ll return to this is part three.

Before I go: so how did I get through the jour­nal this time? Two things are dif­fer­ent now: first, my five year wed­ding anniver­sary is only a few weeks away; and sec­ond: Woolman’s Jour­nal is now always with me inside my Palm Pilot (cour­tesy the Chris­t­ian Clas­sics Ethe­r­i­al Library). A few weeks ago I found myself on the train with­out read­ing mate­r­i­al and start­ed reading!

Next Time: Wrap­ping our­selves in the flag of Woolman

Quak​er​song​.org

March 10, 2006
· Martin Kelley

Quakersong.orgWeb­site for Peter Blood & Annie Pat­ter­son, musi­cians most well known for their insanely-popular song­book Rise Up Singing. They sell books and tapes on the site (e‑commerce han­dled ably and sim­ply by Pay­pal) and they also have lots of high-quality con­tent includ­ing a lot of hard-to-find Pete Seeger CDs. Mov­able Type is used as a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS).

Tech­nolo­gies: Mov­able Type, Pay­pal. Vis­it Site.

Quaker books and self-defeating bargain hunting

May 20, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Got an email in the book­store today from a poten­tial cus­tomer who chose Ama­zon over my employ­er Quaker­books, a niche inde­pen­dent book­store, because of their cheap cheap prices. I got a bit inspired by my reply, includ­ed here.

Sub­ject: book prices

I real­ly want­ed to buy the below book [Why Grace is True], but I checked ama­zon. com. Their prices: new is $16.07, or used from $5.94. Your price is $22.95.

I know how hard it is to be com­pet­i­tive, but I want­ed to let you know that peo­ple do com­par­i­son shop.

Bless­ings, C. 

Dear Friend,

Yes, Ama­zon, Wal­mart and the rest of the glob­al media/distribution jug­ger­naut will always be able to under­price us on the main­stream books.

What we offer is a much wider selec­tion of Quak­er books than any­one else. We don’t just have the more watered-down books aimed at the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion (most­ly with the unsaid premise “what you can learn from those folksy Quak­ers”), but a whole list of books about Quak­er reli­gious edu­ca­tion, Quak­er vision, Quak­er belief, Quak­er his­to­ry and what it means to be a Quak­er today. We don’t just have the Harper­Collins titles, but those from Quak­er pub­lish­ers that Ama­zon’s nev­er heard of. We eas­i­ly beat Ama­zon in selec­tion and we cer­tain­ly match them in speed and cus­tomer service.

We give a more ground­ed con­text to what these books mean to Friends – the reviews on our site’s If Grace is True are writ­ten by Friends for Friends. We try to know our books. When peo­ple call us up we’ll help with their selec­tion. When they’re try­ing to decide, we’ll read the table of con­tents to them. Quak­er pub­lish­ers and book­sellers talk about the “min­istry of the writ­ten word,” which means remem­ber­ing that there’s a pur­pose behind this book­selling. These books aren’t com­modi­ties, they aren’t units, they’re not ISBN num­bers to be packed and shipped. We’d rather not sell a book than sell a book some­one would­n’t val­ue (which is why we’ll include neg­a­tive book descrip­tions & comments).

Pay­ing a few extra dol­lars to sup­port us means your also sup­port­ing the out­reach and Quak­er self-identity our cat­a­log pro­vides for many Friends. Plus you can be assured our employ­ees get liv­ing wages and health care (for which I’m per­son­al­ly thankful).

So yes, cus­tomers can save a few bucks at Ama­zon. Always will be able to. But your pur­chas­ing deci­sions are also deci­sions about who you sup­port and what you val­ue. There’s a price to dis­tinc­tive­ness, whether it’s cul­tur­al, reli­gious, region­al, or culi­nary. By buy­ing from Ama­zon you’re financ­ing a Wall Street-run com­mod­i­ty sell­er that does­n’t give a jot about Quak­erism or even whether grace might be true. If enough Friends choose price over con­tent, then Quak­er book­stores and pub­lish­ers will dis­ap­pear, our only rep­re­sen­ta­tion being main­stream books sold at gener­ic shops. That will cost us a lot more than sev­en bucks.

Well, I hope you enjoy the book. I’m sure Ama­zon appre­ci­ates your patronage.

In friend­ship,
Mar­tin Kelley