James Patterson Gives $500 Holiday Bonuses to Hundreds of Bookstore Employees: ‘Booksellers Save Lives’

James Patterson is once again supporting local bookstores this holiday season.

The Along Came a Spider author, 77, is making sure America’s booksellers get their flowers by donating $300,000 to 600 bookstore employees as part of its holiday bookstore bonus program, according to ABC News.

The 600 people who work at the bookstores — including Birmingham’s Thank You Books in Alabama, Cedar Falls’ The Nook in Iowa and City Lights Books in San Francisco — will each receive a $500 bonus.

Patterson told the ABC in a statement through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, that he was happy to support independent bookstores and their staff.

“Booksellers save lives. Period,” Patterson said. “I’m happy to recognize them and their hard work this holiday season.”

Patterson at SXSW 2022.

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“We appreciate Mr. Patterson’s financial generosity as well as his generosity of spirit. We all continue to be amazed and grateful for Mr. Patterson’s continued support of independent booksellers,” Allison Hill, executive director of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), said in a statement.

“It is all the more important that it recognizes and rewards the valuable role that booksellers play in the industry,” Hill added.

Employees receiving bonuses this season either applied by application or were nominated for their work by a co-worker, friend or author, according to the ABA.

This year’s honorees include Davis Gustafson of Thank You Books, Erin Messer of City Lights, Brandon Conrad of The Nook, Gina Marx of The Lynx in Gainesville, Fla., and Kirstin Kraig of Whale’s Tale Books in Lakewood, Colo., per ABC.

Birmingham’s Thank You Books in Alabama.

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Patterson has similarly donated funds to booksellers many times over the past decade. In March of this year, the ABA announced that the thriller writer would donate another $600,000 to be distributed among booksellers.

Additionally, in 2020, he made a $500,000 donation to several other independent bookstores—nominated by their customers, owners, and employees—across the US as they battled through the COVID pandemic.

“The White House is concerned about saving the airline industry and big business — I get that. But I’m concerned about the survival of independent bookstores, which are at the heart of high streets across the country,” Patterson said in a statement at the time, according to the Book Industry Foundation charity. “I believe books matter. They make us kinder, more empathetic human beings. And they have the power to take us away—even for a moment—from feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and fear.”

“I hope that the funds we collect keep bookstores alive at the moment when we need them the most,” he added.

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In 2014, Patterson also donated $1 million to bookstores, divided into prizes of $15,000 per store.

“They’re blowing up the Andover Bookstore, where the son and daughter wrote, and their father hasn’t gotten a raise since 1988,” he told NPR of the initiative at the time. “A children’s bookstore in Baltimore, they give books to schools and they want the kids to be able to keep the books. Book Passage out in California will be doing more book fairs with it. Little Shop of Stories down in Decatur, Ga., they’re buying the bookmobile again.”

The Alex Cross the author added at the time that he believed the book industry deserved the same intervention as massive industries like banks and the auto industry, simply because literature and reading are good for our culture.

“The government has stepped in to help banks, cars, anything to do with money, but nobody seems to care about books and our bookstores,” he added to NPR at the time. – And I tell you that American literature is in danger.

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Source: HIS Education