business

I am having a quiet afternoon at home. This feels wrong when I know that Howard is down at Dragon’s Keep drawing until his arm falls off. But it is necessary. When Howard arrives home tonight and falls over with exhaustion, I must be alert and energetic enough to catch him before he hits the floor. The house needs to be in order and the kids need to be calm, because nothing is worse than dragging yourself home exhausted to find chaos. The calm and order can not happen unless I am here having a quiet afternoon.

I spent the morning wrangling my way through customs forms and printing international postage. It wasn’t hard, but it did require hours of careful concentration. But it is done. The request for postal pick-up has been made. I think I am ready. Next week the drawing will be all done and it will be my turn to work past the point of exhaustion while Howard recuperates and acts as support personnel.

Yesterday I likened book mailing to a marathon. We have now reached the phase where we’re exhausted and achy. Every step hurts and we wonder why we thought this was a good idea. The knowledge of how far there is left to run looms large. But if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, eventually it will be mostly behind us and we’ll get that second wind to carry us through to completion. 3/4 of the sketch editions are signed and stamped. Hopefully before the end of today half of them will have sketches as well. I’m almost done prepping postage and labels. Come Monday I’ll have a pile more to do because lots more orders came in this week and they’ll need to be sorted and prepped.

A Schlock Mercenary book release is much like running a marathon. There are months and months of advance preparation, book layout, printing, shipping arrangements. Then there are the pre-race jitters. Howard and I both had sleepless nights fretting over unpleasant scenarios. The arrival of the books is like the starters gun. Yesterday we ran flat out as fast as we could, trying to get everything done. Today we’re settling down to a sane pace because we can’t sprint our way through the next week and a half. We have to pick a pace we can maintain and just keep going until it is done.

Our garage smells of printer’s ink and binding glue. This is a happy smell. It is the smell of success. Yesterday, after all the books were moved in and the truck drove away, I stood at my kitchen counter and looked down at the book in my hand. A tension that I have been carrying inside me for two months unwound. I’d grown so used to it, that the release was a surprise. I now have everything I need to make good on the promises I made when I accepted money for books that didn’t exist yet.

There will problems with the mailing. There always are. But now they are all problems I have tools to solve, problems I have solved before. And most of the packages will just go to their recipients with no problems at all.

The truck arrived ahead of schedule rather than behind. The pallets all fit into our garage. The books are all beautiful. Now we just need to have Howard draw pictures in a ton of them. Then mail them all out.

We’ve received word that books will be arriving in our driveway tomorrow. This means it is time for me to start gathering volunteers for the Schlock Mercenary Book Mailing event. The event will be held over two days December 6-7. We’ll be starting up as soon as Dragon’s Keep opens, hopefully 10 AM. We’ll be finishing by 6 pm on Thursday. Friday’s finish time depends on how much work there is left to do. Last year we finished up by 1 pm on Friday. There will be more details as we firm up the arrangements with Dragons Keep and the US postal service pick up.

If you want to be a volunteer I need you to email me. (sandra.tayler via gmail) I’m compiling an email list so I can contact people quickly. Experience has taught me that book mailing always requires some last minute adjustment of plans.

The book release party will be at Dragon’s Keep in Provo on December 8 from 10 AM until late. There will be food and games as well as books.

I worked hard this week, but I’m not done yet. I still have labels to print and mailers to stamp and customs forms to prepare and insert sheets to print. I’m sure there are other things too. I feel like a runner mid-marathon. I’m exhausted and achy and wondering why I got myself into this position, but I can’t stop to rest. I have to keep going. Only that is a false metaphor because I can stop. I can take breaks. But somehow I’m having a hard time actually doing it. There is a drive inside me to hurry and get it done so that I don’t have to do it anymore. There is also an exhaustion in me that doesn’t want to touch it ever again. This isn’t so bad in the mornings when I’m fresh, but by evening I end up wandering around unable to settle into either work or relaxation.

The state of my house matches the state of my mind. It is a mess.

Today I am using my energetic hours to put things into order. I swept the kitchen for the first time all week. Hopefully before the day is over there will be vacuuming. This afternoon my kids have a rehearsal to attend and so I’ll have two and a half hours to myself. I intend to use them frivolously and get myself out of the house. I think I’ll go fabric shopping. I really need some time to just be Sandra without being Mom or or Schlock Mercenary Distribution Coordinator. I need to refill my well of motivation because I have so much left to do.

Apparently my reprieve from feeling stressed was short lived. Last night I got another email from a person inquiring about the status on their Tub of Happiness order. These are reasonable inquiries, but they are frustrating for me to answer because I can’t say “I have your book right here, I’m mailing it tomorrow.” In fact the best I can say is “we intend to ship books the first week of December, which means your book will probably arrive before Christmas, unless the postal service goofs up.” I just know that I’m going to get emails mid December from people who want their books before Christmas, but who chose Media Mail and won’t get them in time. I want to make everyone totally happy with their purchases and I’m not sure I can do it.

Obviously the sooner I can get the shipping done, the better. Unfortunately until the books arrive, there is only a limited amount I can do. In fact how I prioritize the things that need done is dependent upon whether I have two weeks until shipping (this would be great), four weeks to shipping (what I expect), or six weeks until shipping (Please no, I don’t want to be shipping the week before Christmas.) What we know right now is that the books have left China and they have not yet arrived in the US. They are on a boat somewhere. Boats are subject to the vagaries of the weather. Hopefully the boat will make good time, but no guarantees. Then the books have to clear customs. Then the books have to travel by truck to our door. Until that boat hits the dock, we can’t know for certain when the other things will happen. We think we’re a week ahead of the anticipated schedule we were given when we signed the contract, but can’t know for certain.

The problem today is that I’m not certain how to prioritize. If I’ve got four weeks to shipping, then I should spend this week on Teraport Wars layout. But if I’ve only got two weeks to shipping I should be printing mailing labels and stamping mailers. If I’ve got six weeks to shipping I should be sending out 1500 emails apologizing for the delay.

I’m still happier than I was in October. Having 2000 books to ship is a happy problem to have. But I do feel the weight of the need to make good on all those orders.

I began working on the first pass of the lay out for The Teraport Wars today. It is tedious and time consuming, but it is not frustrating or confusing. This makes me very happy. Two chapters down, fourteen more to go. After this pass I’ll begin putting in all the bonus materials into the white spaces.

As of this writing we have sold over 1100 books. Over 900 of those are sketched editions. Howard wants to be able to sketch in a ton of books. He’s very literal about that. 1200 books weigh about a ton, so we’re leaving sketch ordering open a little longer to see if we can reach 1200.

This means that we have paid for all the expenses and stocked away 4 months of bills. This is good. It seems likely that we’ll reach the “happy dance” number of 6 months paid, before we close pre-ordering in November.

Things are looking well and my inner squirrel is happy to have a hoard again.

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.