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.
I was actually wondering how you were going to manage the character-selection process, given the degree to which it complicates matters. Which naturally led into me thinking about how I’d handle the problem myself…
The solution that came to mind, knowing next to nothing about your specific packing processes, was maintaining separate stacks of books for each sketched character – you can just pick a book off the appropriate pile for each request, and with knowledge of the numbers of each that you’ll need, Howard can do the fifty-at-a-time sketching method he used last time to run through each character’s stack.
Of course, there may well be something about the process you’ve developed that would prevent or complicate such a method. Like if you don’t have access to the actual request information when packing a box…
More items?
I wanted to ask, aren’t there normally more things available? I was thinking of buying some more things with the book, but all I could get were books. Shirts, dolls, stickers, or anything else could be a useful addition, especially in the future. It’s easy to say to yourself, ‘Ooh, since I’m going to buy this, why don’t I add this? I can save on shipping.’
Re: More items?
Yes more items would lead to impulse buying. Unfortunately we have only so much space to store things in our house. And we only have so much money for the creation of such items. We’ll get there, but right now books are the biggest money maker and so that is where we focus our attention.
The process
Every invoice that comes in is first sorted for country (US, Canada/Mexico, World Wide.)
Next I sort by shipping method. World Wide has two shipping methods. Canada/Mexico has three. United States has four.
Then I sort by what goes into the package.
On the first pass I just separate orders with sketched editions from orders without.
For the orders without, I’ll further sort by how many books go into each package and which types of books. (Most orders are a single book)
For the orders with sketches I’ll have to sort by character as well as how many books were ordered and which types of books. (Again most orders are a single book.)
At this point I have dozens of little piles that I keep in a file box. But when I go to print out postage on my computer I know that I need 500 stamps that cost $4.60. I download address info from the store and put those with the piles and the stamps for each pile.
All of this means that on the shipping days I can had a volunteer a pile of 50 orders with addresses and stamps, then all they have to do is put exactly the same thing in each package until they run out of invoices.
Store worked like a charm. Cool!
Would be cool to put up a poll so that folks that ordered a sketch edition could show who they requested. I wonder what the popularity is running at.
In a couple of weeks I’ll have an exact count on that.
Re: More items?
Maybe next spring you could offer Schlock T-shirts. You could do one t-shirt per year or so similarly to the way you do books. Have a set window for pre-orders and make pre-ordering mandatory then only print the number of T-shirts per size (plus a few extras to cover defects). I know Chalain likes his Schlock Mercenary T-shirts and wouldn’t mind another.
Re: More items?
This reminds me…
My dad is in the T-Shirt business…
Sandra, we should talk… 🙂
Yay! This makes me HAPPY.
I really want a sketch edition, but I have to wait until Tuesday, Oct 2 to order.
This is not a beg for a sketch edition. I’ll be ordering my Schlock regardless. I got a regular edition of Under New Management and a sketch edition of the Backness Between.
So its cool. Really looking forward to the next book. 😀
No begging is necessary. Just use the “send us feedback” link at the bottom of the store to email me when you’re ready to pay. I’ll help you place an order for a sketch edition. We’ll hold one for you.
Awesome. You guys are great. I’ll get in touch on Oct 2 then. 😀