Merchandise and experience

On the Chinese zodiac we’ve just entered the year of the rat. On the Tayler zodiac this is the year of merchandise. Already this year we’ve put out a handful of posters and we’re in process on t-shirts. As expected, we’ve had more than a few hassles as we hike up the learning curve for producing and shipping things other than books. Last weekend we sold some of the advanced shipment of shirts. Then yesterday I washed the shirts that we’d claimed for Howard and most of the white print washed off. The shirts had been improperly baked. It is a simple error, quickly resolved and won’t be a problem for the rest of the shirts, but I still had a moment of abject terror while staring at that shirt. Ditto today when the printer contacted me about a formatting error on Hold on to Your Horses. The errors themselves are easily fixed, but I’m left with a creeping fear that there is some other error, some big error that won’t be caught until it is too late. For all that I sit on panels at conventions and talk like I know exactly what I’m doing, I’m really just making this up as I go along. Sure I research and plan ahead, but those aren’t the same as experience. Unfortunately the only way for me to get experience is for me to forge ahead and hope for the best.