Digging Out; Moving Forward

Here in central Virginia we got a lot of snow from last Friday afternoon through Saturday night. Today was bright and sunny, though still cold, and I was able to dig out a path for the car in about three hours. Later this afternoon I took a group of about 12 books to the post office and dropped them off in the collection box so they can start on their way to their purchasers tomorrow. I do spend a lot of time on shipping; I use the U.S. Postal Service Click 'N Ship service, which lets me print out the postage and address on a form to be attached to each package. It takes a lot of time to do that, but it has the advantage of discounts for the postage, and free delivery confirmation for domestic Priority Mail shipments.

Today I heard from a buyer in Spain whose book never reached him, after about four weeks. That's frustrating for him and me, but there's nothing to be done except refund his purchase price, which I did immediately. It's quite rare that a shipment doesn't reach a buyer, so I just accept the occasional problem as an ordinary part of the business.

I still have the Google AdWords campaign paused, because I don't want to generate a huge number of orders right now. I want the book to be available to anyone who's looking for it, but by now a Google search may find it anyway without having an ad pop up. I plan to resume the ad campaign later, once the books are being shipped by Lightning Source, but I don't want us to have to buy any more supplies for producing the books ourselves, if that can be avoided.