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1 Break Away from ­ Normal—Get Going on Soon to be Famous: The Why Chapter Denise Raleigh This chapter is the “Ah-hah, I get it!” chapter. Many of you are anxious to skip to the enlightening “how you can do it, too” chapters, but this section will give you interesting statistics and citations that will clearly prove why you should sweep away that boring project that has been gathering dust on your desk (you really did not want to do it anyway) and move quickly forward on the Soon to be Famous (STBF) project in your community. You can use what you learn here as ammunition to get others just as excited as you are about this project. A huge element of this cutting-edge project is that it is about librarian exper- tise, library crowdsourcing, and library power. As described in the introduc- tion, many library folks were extremely energized about library staff working to make an obscure author famous to prove library power after hearing David Vinjamuri speak at the annual American Library Association conference in 2013. As this book is being written, the publishers may be starting to respect libraries a little more, and pricing by the Big Five publishers may be heading to a commonsense place, but this project is amazing even without the under- lying “you done me wrong” fuel. In a nutshell, an author awards project entails library staff nominating self-published authors from their community. All of the “how-tos” of this pro- cess are outlined in chapters 2 through 8. Basically, professional librarians from the community judge the submissions, and the author to be made famous is selected. One absolutely essential element of this project, which must be included without fail, is fun. Meeting new people—librarians, library staffers,