Chapters Indigo and Amazon had better watch their backs. There are some new booksellers in town and they have a lot to offer.
What they lack in online distribution and technological gimmickry they more than make up in cuteness and prolificacy.
They are students in Robin Shaw and Hannah Goddard's kindergarten class at Panorama Heights elementary in Coquitlam, and boy, do they know how to sell books.
The students discovered they had a flare for creating books after contributing a page each to a class book, said Shaw. "They thought: 'well, we should sell books then because we're real authors and we're that good.'"
They called their endeavour Mrs. Shaw's Book Store and brainstormed their ideas, distribution plan and what they would use the money for. "I could retire early but that's probably not the best thing," Shaw said, and because it was around mid-November when they came up with the idea, Share Family and Community Services was chosen as the cause.
The students set about making their books and putting posters around the school and soon the orders out-paced their book-making ability. Their parents bought them, but so did other students in the school. Before long, the class had to contract out some of the book-making duties to other kindergarten students in the school.
"The older kids just fell in love with this idea, and literally, we had to limit it to one book per student," said Shaw.
The books are small, stapled and colourful with pictures and words. In some cases, Shaw scribed for the children, often the pictures alone told the story. "We're writing about Christmas. It's for the poor people," is how Kaia McLaughlin described her books with their candy canes and stars.
Cole Vajda said he wrote books about Spiderman, Harry Potter, divers and monster trucks, "different kinds of books," and when asked how many books he wrote, he said "14," holding up five fingers.
By Dec. 9, when The News visited, the class had sold 100 books, raising $200 for Share, and was planning a field trip to the food bank.
No word on whether Chapters or Amazon are aware of the competition, but perhaps the class's next endeavour should be e-books.
