Escrevendo itens em um banco de dados MySQL no Scrapy

import sys
import MySQLdb
import hashlib
from scrapy.exceptions import DropItem
from scrapy.http import Request

class MySQLStorePipeline(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.conn = MySQLdb.connect('host', 'user', 'passwd', 
                                    'dbname', charset="utf8",
                                    use_unicode=True)
        self.cursor = self.conn.cursor()

    def process_item(self, item, spider):    
        try:
            self.cursor.execute("""INSERT INTO example_book_store (book_name, price)  
                        VALUES (%s, %s)""", 
                       (item['book_name'].encode('utf-8'), 
                        item['price'].encode('utf-8')))            
            self.conn.commit()            
        except MySQLdb.Error, e:
            print "Error %d: %s" % (e.args[0], e.args[1])
        return item