Bad Astronomy reviews Happiest Days

Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives!

This book is really good. Are you a geek? Grew up playing video
games? Go to cons? Watch Trek? Have your own set of d10s, d12, and d20s
(and if you even know what that means, then yes, you count)? Yeah, you
know who you are. You are already one of us, whether you admit it or
not. Come. Join us. Be with Wil and Phil and countless others who enjoy
— nay, revel — in nerddom.

Wil’s writing makes this way of life less of the fringe it was when
I was a kid and more of a real thing, a legitimate lifestyle choice.
Sure, you get razzed by others, but this is really how we are.
You get a taste of it through Wil’s eyes, through his reminiscing.
There’s a nice mix of real-guy-with-a-life-and-family mixed in with
fanboy mixed in with being an actual TV and movie actor. Also, I play
poker, so his story about a Hollywood poker speakeasy made me laugh.

To mark this occasion, I am happy to announce that within the next 24 hours I’ll begin accepting orders from everywhere in the world. In addition to the US, we’ll ship to The Canada, The UK, The The European Union, The Australia, and The Everywhere Else. International customers: please understand that the shipping costs are insane, and because I have to fill out each custom form by hand, shipping times will take at least two weeks, but I’ll do my best to make it shorter.

I’m still working on a solution to sell the hardbacks. I’m getting closer, and I don’t think I’ll be able to use PayPal as a shopping cart and storefront, because the problem I’m currently having, item numbers aren’t showing up in multiorder shiping, has existed and remained untouched by PayPal since April.

We’re currently looking at lots of different cart and backend options, and we may have found something that is going to work for us, and is Open Source as a bonus! We looked at Yahoo shopping, Z Shops at Amazon, and Google Checkout, but they all had various deal-killing issues.

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37 thoughts on “Bad Astronomy reviews Happiest Days”

  1. Hurra! I can get Happiest Days in Germany now! Great! :)) I’m so looking forward to reading it, just finished “Barefoot” and totally loved it.
    Nicole aka Louffi

  2. A future customer from The Netherlands checking in here 😉
    Whatever the shipping costs or however long it takes, doesn’t matter. I WANT THAT BOOK! 😛
    One question though: Will the Hardbacks also be shipping to Europe? Autographed ones?? 😀

  3. I’d be delighted to see a post in which you expound in true geekwise fashion on what the suckage is with Yahoo shopping, Z Shops, et. al. I’m having some quasi future need for such a thing myself and would rather steal your wisdom than go get my own, you know?

  4. It’s awesome that you are continually expanding your business. I’m having a lot of fun watching it happen. I hope your entrepreneurial spirit continues to pay off for you!

  5. If you haven’t yet investigated it, you might look at Shopify as a possible solution. The cool thing about it is that it’s coded in Ruby on Rails, which makes any who uses it beyond cool.
    I have programmed sites to use OSCommerce and ZenCart (both based on the same code) and they work, but can be troublesome. Similarly, there are plugins for various open source content management systems (like VirtueMart for Joomla) which I’ve had success building for clients.
    If you have pros to advise you on these, good. If not, consider Shopify or an equivalent where they handle everything and charge you a percentage fee.

  7. Wil, you are the BEST! \m/
    I almost feel bad about being one more customs form you’re sooo going to have to fill out 🙂
    I second Paul’s question, though: what about the autographed hardback?? Because that is what I want 🙂

  9. Wil, although I am not international, I am so happy that you got this part worked out. It actually made me feel bad for your readers over seas.
    And, hey! You are in the lead for best celebrity blog – I think I’ll pull a “Wil” move and vote continuously until the poll ends 😉

  10. Wil – not sure if you’re checking your comments at the moment, but I saw your twitter & I don’t see a place to order the hardcover at Monolith. Is it just me? Every book listed says paperback.
    Oh, and now I have “The Final Countdown” stuck in my head. Thanks for that.

  14. Yay for the rest of the world.
    Now, here’s a selfish request. I’m not going to be home this weekend. Can you hold announcing the hardback sales until Monday at the earliest? I want to be able to buy one!
    Hee. That was lame, I know. Just with my luck lately, I know they’ll be all sold out the next time I can check in. Good luck with whatever method you choose.

  15. Yey! I can now add this to my collection. It is my treat to myself this month as I am particularly skint. It’s actually still a very cool price even with the shipping costs so don’t worry 🙂 Bring on Tech rehearsals so I can read it in between programming the LX desk….oh yes…the geek fest has started! 🙂

  16. You haven’t mentioned this, so I wanted to bring it up just in case it hadn’t occurred to you. Military people overseas (with APO or FPO addresses) often have problems from merchants who won’t ship to them because they think it’s too difficult. I just wanted to make sure you knew that it’s actually quite simple. Yes, we require a customs form, and we’re willing to pay you for your time to fill that thing out (or even to fill it out for you and send it to you) but as far as postage costs are concerned, our addresses are US addresses, not foreign ones. Postage to APO and FPO is domestic, not international. A package costs the same to send to Baghdad, Okinawa, or England as it does to Phoenix, Albuquerque, or Bangor, if the address is “APO, AE” or something like that.
    And yes, I’m one of those overseas military guys, and hellz yes, I’m in ur blog, waiting to order ur signed/numbered hardback.

  17. Thanks a lot for opening the sale worldwide. As you will (hopefully) see, I’m by far not the only german (or any non-US-resident for that case) who will jump in to order in that timeframe.
    (I even signed in to just say that 🙂

  23. Kudos to the International Monkeys! Tomorrow is my birthday, and the book is my most highly-anticipated gift, can’t wait. $10 says I’ll have it finished by tomorrow evening…
    Clcked over to the Weblog Awards everyone’s talking about. Seriously, how does Rosie’s blog even get considered? I’ve seen better posts from Emo kids on MySpace, for crying out loud. I’m willing to bet my 10 month old could post a more thought-out and proper blog entry.
    And Kanye West has a blog? Yeah, I’ll pass. His remix of that one Bond theme was alright, but he’s nothing special, and certainly not worthy of an RSS feed…
    PayPal is teh suck. I’m glad my better half ordered early…

  25. How cool is that??? I live in The Germany and can order the book now! And with the crappy exchange rate the dollar has right now, it has an affordable price, even with the shipping costs. Can’t wait to get the book!

  26. Totally OT, but, since Wil mentioned Comet Holmes on Twitter… there are some cool video podcasts on iTunes from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope with some amazing pictures and commentary called Hidden Universe. Very short, just don’t do the HD version because that’s only for Apple TV. There’s also a Hubble Cast.

  27. Time to put my money where my mouth is hey? Thanks for shipping to Australia Wil, I know how painul it must be to fill in those custom forms by hand – ordered!

  28. “Painul”, no doubt (of course, I meant “Peanut Filled”, blame my sausage fingers)
    I forgot to ask…wouldn’t selling the hardback be as simple as creating a new paypal account and letting people pay through that? They couldn’t buy a softback AND a hardback at the same time but at least they could buy either of them.
    I’m sure you’ve considered this already.

  29. Nothing to do with this post at all. But I just had to tell you that your Midvale “stunt” cracked me up. I shouldn’t admit this in public, but I do stuff like that…more often than I should. I’m also prone to running into automatic doors that don’t open as quickly as I think they should – but my husband says this is because I don’t have a soul. LOL

  31. Wil,
    For what it’s worth, I just ordered some videos from a small business at bugmevideo.com.
    I suspect they’re a small operation, too. They have 10 different DVDs that they sell in combination. You go to their order form and check off the videos that you want, and it looks like they dynamically generates a new item number and item name that then goes into PayPal.
    The item number was just a number, “50” in my case. The item name contained the information as to what I was ordering; I ordered videos 2, 3, and 5 on DVD, so the resulting item name was “DVD V2 V3 V5”.
    I don’t know if using them as an example would help you fix your PayPal problems or not, but I just thought I’d pass that along.
    Good luck!
    Sincerely,
    Craig Steffen

  32. That’s the best news I’ve read in a week – THDOOL available for order worldwide. Can’t wait to see it next to Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek in the shelf – *after* I’ve read it non-stop.

  33. Wil: Just found your site and have been enjoying it. I will definitely order your new book but I would like to wait for the hardback so I’ll keep checking it out. I’m 39 and grew up in the same time period so I can’t wait to read it.
    Funny that I found your site today because last weekend my daughter was old enough to see Stand by Me and because it is one of the few movies I own–we watched it together. Such a great flick!
    -Murphy

  34. My book arrived this morning all the way in Nova Scotia. Thanks so much Wil 🙂 I’m putting together another small order of them for Christmas gifts.
    Time to go grab a latte and sit down and read.

  35. WHOO HOO, Wil!
    Major achievement there, organizing worldwide shipping. The ordering thing will work out eventually; you are dedicated enough to make it happen.
    And the BadAstronomer review is great! He put into words something I think everyone here understands – how well you convey your stories to your audience. You have a voice unlike any other, and we appreciate all of your efforts to bring it to us.
    From all of us Wil, thank you.

  36. I don’t know if this would work but can you use etsy.com as your shopping cart? I know them for a lot of cool hand crafted stuff like jewelry so I don’t know if they would do books, but they seem to be the type of operation that you would like.

  37. I recently started up a small press at http://www.lilleypress.com, I’d be happy to share some of our solutions to the issues you are facing if you would like.
    We focus on eBooks primarily, but we do have a solution ready for Hardcover, tradeback, and pocketbook editions when we get our first set of books out. And I have the store design in the works as well.
    So if you’d like to compare notes with another small publishing company I wouldn’t mind sharing our methods and talking shop ;).
    Or you could just sign with us instead and we’ll create a non-fiction imprint just for you LOL 😉 (can’t hurt to ask)

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