If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader.  Recommend Nicholas Sparks.

6.  Kids will stop by your store on their way home from school if you have a free bucket of kids books.  If you also give out free gum, they'll come every day and start bringing their friends.

AFTER careful consideration, Jessica Hanff has found the ideal spot for the art that her 4-year-old daughter, Elisabeth, brings home from preschool: the trash can.

Here is my big idea: stop trying to kill your stammer. That metaphor about the homunculus, or the badly-behaved dog, or however you visualize it, eventually becomes a hindrance to resolution. Change how you perceive your stammer. Stop seeing it as an enemy to be vanquished: it is an integral part of the process of how you think, perceive others, and process language, and no good ever came of hating an integral part of yourself (as opposed to an undesirable character trait.) Your stammer informs your relationship with language and enrichens it, if only because you need more structures and vocabulary at your command.

I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that.