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Written by: Texas Authors Institute of History

Category: Uncategorised

Published: 27 December 2025

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Congratulations! An author has awarded you a 2026 Year of the Reader Gift Certificate.

Your certificate includes a matching set featuring one design across all items:

• 1 T-shirt (design printed on the front)

• 1 coffee mug

• 1 3” square sticker

How to Redeem Your Certificate

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(Note: The same design must be used on the T-shirt, mug, and sticker.)

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Subject line: Year of the Reader Certificate Redemption

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Written by: Texas Authors Institute of History

Category: Uncategorised

Published: 27 December 2025

Hits: 197

Want a simple way to thank a real reader with a real gift—without guessing their size, their style, or what design they’d actually wear?

The TAMIH Reader Appreciation Gift Certificate lets you do exactly that.

You purchase a certificate (good for one year), award it to a reader, and then they choose their favorite design from the current Reader Appreciation collection. Once they redeem it, TAMIH handles the rest—we produce, process, and ship a matched set featuring the same design across all items:

• 1 T-shirt

• 1 mug

• 1 sticker

This isn’t a generic gift card that gets forgotten. It’s a clean, branded “thank you” that becomes a wearable, shareable badge of support—something your reader can show off online and in the real world.

Why authors love it:

• You look professional (and generous) without creating extra work for yourself

• No awkward size-guessing or shipping logistics

• The reader gets choice, so redemption rates go up

• The set matches, so it feels intentional—not random

• It builds loyalty: readers remember the author who recognized them

Perfect for:

• newsletter giveaways and milestones

• ARC / street-team thank-yous

• contest prizes and launch-day rewards

• bookstore/event appreciation gifts

• “you stuck with me this year” reader recognition

You buy it. You award it. They pick the design. TAMIH fulfills and ships.
If you want readers to feel seen—and keep coming back—this is one of the easiest, most meaningful ways to do it.

Authors Purchase here: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/YZWF8VMVXL8JA 

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Written by: Texas Authors Institute of History

Category: Uncategorised

Published: 19 December 2025

Hits: 195

Reading isn’t just a hobby—it’s one of the simplest, most reliable ways to strengthen a mind, steady a spirit, and stay connected to the world around you. A few pages a day builds focus in a time designed to fracture attention, expands vocabulary and comprehension without feeling like “work,” and quietly trains you to think in nuance instead of headlines. Stories grow empathy by letting you live inside someone else’s choices; nonfiction sharpens judgment by giving you context, history, and better questions. Reading also creates something rare: uninterrupted time with an idea—time to reflect, to imagine, to recover, to learn, and to feel less alone. The articles below were written by authors who believe in that power. Each one offers a different angle—practical, personal, historical, funny, moving—so you can explore what reading does for people and why it still matters in 2026 and beyond.

Get inspired to read from one of these great articles:

Why Read Fiction? by Clara Sneed

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Written by: Texas Authors Institute of History

Category: Uncategorised

Published: 19 December 2025

Hits: 212

Why Read Fiction?

by Clara Sneed

Answers to this question have been making the rounds: Read fiction because it stimulates the brain, increases empathy, may help ward off dementia, helps you understand the world and its people in more complex ways. In other words, read fiction because it’s good for you. Like maintaining a strong core or eating your vegetables. If you’re like me, your reaction to this kind of stuff is, “Oh, no, there’s something else I need to do!” Because you’re already doing plenty.

I’d rather talk about the pleasures of good fiction. There are some obvious ones, but I’ve been thinking a lot about three that aren’t so obvious:

1)     Privacy. This is an almost impossible-to-obtain pleasure in our wired-up world (and becoming more so all the time). And if you’re reading an e-book, or listening to an audiobook (or on Audible), your reading choices are not entirely private. But if you pick up a physical book—yours, borrowed, bought, or checked out—you’re as anonymous as modern life allows. Someone might glimpse a cover, sure, but the real privacy is internal: no one can see what images you’re building, what memories you’re stirring, or what a single line just did to your mood. And no one knows—this holds true for e-readers, audiobooks, or Amazon orders, etc.—what you’re thinking, imagining, feeling, or how you’re reacting to what you’re reading. It’s just you and the book.

2)     Intimacy. This goes along with privacy. Reading a novel is an intimate exchange—a partnership—between the writer and the reader. No one else is involved in that exchange, even if others are listening to or reading the same book at the same time. The writer tells a story, using only words to tell it. You, the reader, imagine the sights and sounds and characters to go along with those words. Your version of the novel’s world is as individual and idiosyncratic as your nighttime dreams. It isn’t exactly the world the writer or any other reader imagines.

3)     Uniqueness. Sometimes people try to coax you into reading a novel by telling you that it resembles a visual story-telling medium you’re more familiar with. (Which reminds me a little of the American woman’s comment when she first saw a French chateau: “Oh, it looks exactly like Disneyland.” Actually, it’s the other way around.)

But there is no other art form that does what an excellent novel does in the way an excellent novel does it. Music and the visual arts can stir us deeply, often in ways we have no words for. Great movies or series likewise leave us altered in the way great art alters what it moves through. Excellent non-fiction can educate, inform and stir us, sometimes in ways almost novelistic. But the experience of reading a great novel combines a kind of meditative quiet (the act of reading or listening) with an explosion of images and feelings in the mind and spirit of the reader. In the contemporary world—where we are bombarded by human/AI-created images and sound—the quiet, meditative aspect of reading takes a little getting used to, like walking in the woods if you’re used to cities. But like a walk in the woods, reading a good novel is worth the adjustment. And the intimate collaboration between writer and reader that a novel requires means that you preserve your side of that collaboration—it forms part of the compost that becomes your inner world. I might remember Kendall Roy staring at the river in Succession or the teddy bear in Adolescence—both superb series—but they don’t become mine in the same way as Gatsby’s “raw sunlight upon the scarcely created grass” (The Great Gatsby).

It's worth noting that these three pleasures—privacy, intimacy and uniqueness—are part of why authoritarian societies will often limit, ban or burn books, especially novels. It’s why slaveholders didn’t want the enslaved to read. When a group or person with power wants to limit the space/time you have to draw your own conclusions, they will go right after books. So to the three pleasures I’ve listed, I’m adding a fourth: freedom. This line is often attributed to Frederick Douglass: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” George R. R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons, says: "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one.” Susan Sontag, often quoted from “Literature Is Freedom,” said it best: “Literature [is] the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature [is] freedom."  

Learning to read novels, and then learning to read novels well, is a most worthwhile use of your time. It may be something of an ‘acquired taste’—like strong coffee or dark chocolate—but a great novel will fully repay your time and effort.

The above article was written by Clara Sneed for the Texas Authors Magazine, March 2026 Issue.

Clara Sneed splits her time between Berkeley, California, and Milam County, Texas—where her fifth-generation Texas roots fuel the kind of storytelling that won’t let go. A lifelong writer who started in poetry and grew into novels, she brings family history and cultural mythmaking into sharp focus in Before We Turn to Dust (Blue Handle Press, Dec. 2024), a gripping, multi-perspective reimagining of a 1912 Texas scandal involving her great-uncle Beal Sneed, his wife Lena, and her lover Al—an intense exploration of passion, betrayal, loyalty, and truth. She followed with Because This is Texas (Blue Handle Press, June 2025), a nonfiction account that digs into how communities shape—and sometimes distort—stories of heroism, guilt, and justice. Clara’s advice is as practical as her work is powerful: read widely, let drafts rest before editing, and don’t trust your first reaction to your own pages. If you’re drawn to Texas history, human complexity, and stories that echo long after the last line, Clara Sneed is an author to put on your must-read list—learn more about Clara here: Clara Sneed