Booking a Future

Island woman holds book auction for Slave Lake library

Ryan Quigley

Journal Pioneer

Colleen McKie is a book blogger and writer. So when she learned that Slave Lake’s library, less than 2-years old, had burned in the wildfires experienced by the town, she decided she wanted to do something to help.

After seeing several book auctions for relief of other tragedies, McKie decided that was what she would do.

Almost immediately Alaskan writer Don Rearden offered a signed copy of one his books for her to auction. From there she’s had generous donations from authors such as Kelley Armstrong, Angie Abdou and Kathy Reichs while authors such as Jo Ann Yhard are offering to critique 20 pages of an unpublished manuscript.

McKie is using social network sites such as twitter and facebook to get her website out in the public eye, even getting TV star Jim Beaver, who stars in the series Supernatural, to post a link to her website on his twitter account after her friend Jody Bernard asked him to.

Since starting the site Monday, McKie has received over 2,000 hits and made over $500. McKie has been approached by people looking to donate art and sea glass jewelry to the auction.

She said she has been overwhelmed with the success of the website and from the donations from writers.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised,” she said. “I’m not really anybody and a lot of the other ones have been a joint effort or it’s been a bigger named author that’s done it.”

She said at this moment auctions items are up for five days, though she would like to cut it down to three.

“I’m going to shorten that time to where they run for three days or else I’m going to end up running the auction all summer,” she said. “I’d like to wrap it up in two or three weeks.”

She did add that if there is a lot of success she would extend it.

McKie said that she owes a lot of her success to social networking, especially twitter, which has given her the ability to spread her auction.

“I really, seriously believe that if it wasn’t for twitter I would not have been able to do this and if I did do it, it would not be near as successful as it’s been.”

McKie has never been to Alberta, let alone Slave Lake but said she has received thank you messages from people who contacted her from the area.

“I’ve been in contact with the library and I’ve had other people in Slave Lake get a hold of me,” she said. “It makes them feel good to know there’s people in P.E.I. that have never been to Alberta that are willing to help do something.”