Smile, Please

Brevity’s Fundraising Team

The next weeks are rich with holidays – Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, New Year’s Eve – and the Brevity blog would like to mark these occasions by publishing your brief essays centering on holiday smiles. The smiles can be joyous, wry, crooked, melancholy, sentimental, or dripping with sarcasm, as long as you are smiling and the essay centers on a late November to early January holiday, including any we’ve forgotten to mention above.  The best works will be printed here on the blog. The best of the best, determined by the readers themselves, will be awarded a $25 Amazon gift certificate.

We hope also to encourage readers to use Amazon Smile to help Brevity pay authors and grow stronger. Yes, Amazon’s relationship to book sales and authors remains controversial, but we also know that many of our loyal readers use Amazon to make non-book related purchases. So we ask that you continue to purchase books from your local independent bookseller, if you are lucky enough to have one nearby, and to channel other Amazon holiday shopping through the Amazon Smile Brevity Link. It’s easy: you simply use this link (it doesn’t cost you a cent) and we get a few pennies on every purchase. You can bookmark the link and make it your permanent Amazon entryway, which would really make us smile.

Meanwhile, send your Holiday Smile flash essay (300-words or fewer), along with a brief bio, to brevitymag+smile@gmail.com no later than midnight December 21^st, 2014.  Entries are free if you promise scout’s honor to use Brevity Smile for your holiday shopping this year and help us grow stronger and more smiley.