Business preparations for the rest of the summer
The book shipping for Scrapyard was just over two weeks ago and I am just now starting to feel settled again. The spate of order corrections has subsided and I’ve reorganized my shipping area so that I’m set up for daily order handling instead of massive shipping. I’m not sure whether it is good news or bad news, but most of the order corrections can be directly traced to my errors. I was so frazzled during the month of April that many things got misplaced. I’m going to call it good news because I can arrange to do things differently this next time. For one thing, I won’t be scrambling to put out a book while I am simultaneously managing customer support for a pre-order. My breathing room will last for about a week. Next Wednesday we open pre-orders on both XDM X-treme Dungeon Mastery and on sketched editions of the Under New Management reprint.
In related news, my attempt to upgrade from Adobe CS2 to Adobe CS4 are still incomplete. I successfully uninstalled CS2, but CS4 informed me that my computer is too old and stupid to run it. In order to appease the program we need to give it more RAM and install the latest service pack for XP. The service pack has been installed without incident, but the RAM is going to take a week to arrive. This leaves me unable to do an graphic design work for a week. This is okay since I’m going to spend some of the time away from my computer camping. But even though it is unlikely I would have used those programs anyway, the fact that I can’t use them makes a piece of my brain nervous. Why is it that any change to the way a computer runs always necessitates buying more new things to support the new thing you actually wanted?
At least arranging shipment of books to Gencon was simpler than I expected. I’ve now arranged for two pallets to be picked up from my house and shipped to the Indianapolis warehouse. I’ve also arranged for transport of those pallets to the show floor. I’ve even filled out bills of lading for sending whatever remains back to us. All of this is not cheap, but we still hope the show will break a profit for us. Getting books to Worldcon in Canada is proving to be more difficult. Howard and I will not be running a booth in the dealer’s room. We’ve attempted to contact dealers and set up a consignment deal, but so far no one has even responded. So I guess we’re just going to have to tell fans to buy books in advance if they want Howard to sign them. The focus for Worldcon will be on panels and visiting rather than on selling, which will actually be a nice vacation for us. Last year I spent the entire convention in the dealer’s room. I had fun, but this year I want to do some of the other stuff.