Not Enough Hours in the Day

I didn't get a chance to write this entry until almost 11:00 p.m., pretty late for me. That's because things are so busy. Ten individual orders today, including one from a new country -- Portugal. Also orders from Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands, as well as the U.S. I cut the Google AdWords budget to $10.00 today, because we really have about all the orders we can handle at the moment. I was going to delay filling the latest Amazon order for a while until we could build the inventory back up, but they e-mailed me this morning with a reminder, saying they would like to have the Amazon Advantage orders confirmed within 24 hours. So I confirmed the latest order, and we will try to ship them 32 books within the next few days. Our production is doing better; today Clenise bound 26 books in one session, a new record. Then we had to trim them, inspect them, and shrink-wrap them, while constantly printing new ones. Both printers were working today, but we're waiting for a new shipment of toner before we can print many more copies.

No real problems today; by now we've experienced just about every problem, so we're more ready to deal with issues as they arise. The cutter's blade is starting to get a bit dull, so soon we'll be faced with ordering a new blade to use while we get that one sharpened. That will run us around $300. There are plenty of expenses, and it's not yet clear that we'll be able to make any profit. But things are busy and interesting, and that's not so bad. Clenise and I are learning something useful every day, and maybe we can put the information to good use for future projects, or for later stages of this one.