Day: September 20, 2007

Things are going well.

Our experience with releasing the last two books tells us that we will get about 60% of our total orders in the first 24 hours. The remaining orders will trickle in during the rest of the pre-order period. We are less than 12 hours into pre-ordering and we’ve almost reached 50% of our goal. Naturally I’ll still be a little antsy until we’ve met or exceeded our sales goal, but I’m feeling optimistic that we will meet it.

So far there have been 533 sketched editions ordered. Howard is lobbying for extending the ordering time on Sketched editions and I’m considering it. Last time he sketched over 800 and it went really smoothly even though he was tired at the end. But every sketch edition sold pays bills ever farther in the future and that makes me happy. But I can’t let the extension run too long because allowing people to select characters adds another whole layer of complexity to the sorting I must do to prepare for shipping. I need time to figure all of that out. Fortunately I have that time since we opened pre-ordering two months in advance instead of just one.

I’ve fielded a pile of email this morning. Some were people begging for special help. Fortunately all of the requests were well within my ability to supply. It makes me happy to be able to help people so easily and they’re always so grateful. I had one email from a guy who had a miserable time working our store. I’m not sure why he had such an awful time. His description of the problem was unlike anything I’d heard from any other buyer. But he fought his way through and placed an order anyway. It makes me so glad to have people care so much to buy our books that they’ll perservere in the face of stupid store software. As I start printing and sorting invoices I’ll be contacting people who have incomplete orders to see if they need further help. Fortunately most of the emails I’ve gotten indicate that the store is working well for most people.

So for the next week or so I take a big breather. Then I dive into shipping tasks, like printing and sorting invoices, figuring out how many sketched editions feature each of the characters, figuring out how many boxes to buy, getting more global priority mailers, ordering stamps to go in the sketched editions, renting a storage unit, and a host of other such activities. I’m hoping that I can make the shipping days run even more smoothly than they did last year even though the process will be even more complex. (Three possible books instead of two and specific sketches required for specific orders.)

Things are going well.

Today I went to the case lot sale at a local grocery store. This is a sale where you get low prices for buying in large quantities. It happens twice per year and I use the opportunity to stock up on non-perishables. So I filled my cart with several hundred pounds of canned goods and steered it into a check out line. The cashier was an older gentleman who kept trying to make conversation with me as I hoisted cases of cans from my cart onto the conveyer belt. Once I got everything unloaded from the cart. I went down to the other end and began loading things back in. I was about half done when I noticed a sign posted that instructed baggers not to require people to unload cases from their carts. Instead the little tags were to be removed from cases and scanned. That would have been nice to know much earlier. It also would have been nice to have a bagger at all. But at least the cashier was impressed. He kept saying “good job, young lady!” in a way that was highly annoying. But then I suspect that he wouldn’t much like being called an “older gentleman” on the internet, so I guess we’re even.

In other news, we’ve sold enough books to pay for the print run. Now we just need to sell enough to provide living expenses for six months.