The Story of When I Started a Greeting Card Company

And it's Independent Bookstore Day -- Catch me at Symposium Books today 12-1 and Newtonville Books 2-4!! And a final call for preorder perks!!!

Today is Independent Bookstore Day, which I’m sure you already knew about, and I hope your plans today include going to a bookstore and spending your money and feeling GOOD about spending your money because you are supporting good people and your community instead of raising money to send Katy Perry to space again.

I am making a few stops today — at Symposium Books in Providence from 12-1 with a whole bunch of other authors, and then I will get on the highway and I will be in Newton MA from 2-4 pm at Newtonville Books (the mothership, my former employer). If you come see me, you can get one of these stickers!*

*with the purchase of a preorder of The Road to Tender Hearts, which is finally out on Tuesday! Can you believe it???

There also several other ways you can get this sticker! You can preorder from Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH (anytime this weekend!) and I will throw in a sticker along with the keychain, postcard, and signed book I already promised you.

I will also have stickers with me on tour, so if you’re coming to see me on tour, you can get a sticker at that event! Here’s all my tour events — starting off the week at Newtonville Books on Tuesday, Unlikely Story on Weds, Gibson’s in Concord NH on Thursday, Harvard Books on Friday, Riff Raff on Saturday… and that is only week one!

Also hey — if you preorder from ANY bookstore, I might not be able to get you a sticker, but I will send you a postcard! Preorder from ANY bookstore and send me your address to theroadtotenderhearts@gmail.com and I’ll send you a postcard.

Speaking of the postal system… in The Road to Tender Hearts, one of the main characters, Sophie, just lost her job at a Greeting Card company.

I was talking this week to Jason at the great podcast Gays Reading (Jason is a charmer and I love him— our episode will be up soon!) — and he asked me a question about the greeting card industry. He was complaining about generic cards…

And I was like… well…

Once, I started a greeting card company and it wasn’t generic at all.

I was 22 and teaching 5th grade in a non-traditional school — I have so many stories about that year. Another time. — and in my spare time, I started a greeting card company. It was called “Tit Nip Greeting Cards” and it was cards made out of drawings built off… nipple prints. Like thumb print art? But nipple art.

Proceeds were supposed to go to breast cancer research.

I really made a group of friends sit around topless and we passed around the tempera paint (and laughed A LOT).

Once the paint was dry, then I would make a drawing around the print.

My dad thought the company was a GREAT idea and he was going to help make the company an LLC but then, one weekend, I took all the cards to a party to show them off— I had made about 500. My friends were amused, but because we were 22, a friend of mine drank too much vodka and threw up on most of my stock.

So the company was burnt to the ground before it ever got going. I still have a few of the cards, and my friend Tasha has two of them framed in her house.

So maybe if this whole writing thing doesn’t work out, I’ll return to nipple art.

Okay that leads me to one final plea to preorder my book/come see me at one of my tour events. Please don’t make me go back to the nipple printing factory. It was so cold there.

xxx

Annie