Category: Books

UPDATE at noon: I just talked to TokyoPop, and confirmed that we won’t be coming to Huntington Beach tonight. I’m real sorry for the three people who were going to come out to visit, but I’ll get in touch with a store down there (anyone have a suggestion for an indie shop in OC?) to schedule something in the near future.

Our final stop on the Star Trek Manga promotional tour is tonight in Huntington Beach, as part of a teen literacy event at Barnes & Noble.

Christine Boylan, who wrote the cover story, and I will be there to sign books and hang out, and if you have copies of my books that you want to bring with you, I’m happy to sign them. I’m bringing my DS for Mariokarting, as well.

Details from the B&N Storefinder:

Bella Terra
7881 Edinger Ave. #110
Huntington Beach, CA 92647
714-897-8781

We’ll be there from 7-9.

UPDATED at 10a.m.: I’ve just gotten word from TokyoPop that our
participation in this event may be canceled. Check this post during the
day, or follow me on Twitter for more news when I get it.

My head was pounding when I went to bed last night, and is still pounding as I write this, seven hours later. I had one of those nights where I couldn’t get comfortable and woke up about once an hour,
so I finally decided to just give in and get out of bed about an hour ago.

I still have the headache that I kept waking me up all night, but I did get to watch a beautiful sunrise while my coffee brewed.

Why do I have a throbbing headache that kept me up all night? Oh, this is just fantastic . . .

I took a box of books to the post office yesterday, so about 100 of you guys who placed orders in the first couple of days can start checking your mailboxes on Friday. I understand that many readers who bought The Happiest Days of Our Lives are starting to get their books, and it looks like it’s taking about a week for them to arrive. If you’ve gotten your book and had a chance to read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, either in a comment, an e-mail, or via review at Monolith Press.

Speaking of the book, I wanted to clarify something about the signed, numbered, limited edition hardback: it hasn’t arrived from the printer, yet, so we can’t start taking orders. I can’t even do pre-orders, because I don’t know how much it will weigh to calculate what we need to charge for shipping. Also, I’ve encountered two significant problems with the otherwise-perfect PayPal ordering system:

1) When I print multiple orders, it’s not passing the item number through with the address and buyer information. Until we can figure out why it’s doing this, we can’t take different orders for different products. We’re working on it, but the FAQs at PayPal are pretty goddamn useless. If you’ve had any experience with this problem and solving it, would you let me know what you did?

2) PayPal won’t let me automatically process Canadian orders along with US orders. That’s annoying, but it gets even worse: if I use the otherwise-awesome "print shipping label" option, which handles postage and addressing and all that good stuff, it forces me to buy an international priority mail envelope for 9 dollars. Since I’m only charging 5 dollars for shipping, I’d lose money doing it that way, and I can’t justify charging Canadian customers more than half the cover price to pay for shipping. It wasn’t like this when we did Dancing Barefoot, so I asked at my local post office, and the woman told me I can ship books to Canada for around 3 dollars, but to do that, we’ll have to process orders the old way, and I still have to fill out customs forms. By hand. For each fucking one. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this sucks, and how much work it’s going to be to handle Canadian orders, now. Thank you very much, stupid intrusive government regulations that waste my time and cost me money. I don’t know why the rules have changed so much since we did Barefoot, because we could just identify the books as "bound, printed matter" back then and avoid the customs hassle. This is the opposite of awesome, and I’d love any advice on dealing with this from indie sellers who have dealt with it already.

So what do these things mean for customers? Until I can figure out WTF is wrong with PayPal, I can’t take hardback orders. This isn’t an issue right now, because they aren’t even here from the damn printer, but it’s going to be a potentially disastrous issue for me and my business if we can’t solve it within a week or so.

I’m currently working on a backup plan to deal with this stuff, but I’m sure there has to be a way to make this work using the tools I already have. If you have a small business and handle payments and order processing the way I’m trying to, would you please get in touch and let me know how you did it?

Finally, I updated the FAQ at Monolith Press over the weekend, and forgot to mention it until just now.

Anne and I sat on the floor in our living room, while Two Zombies Later played on the stereo (which I’d rechristened as a Hi-Fi for this special occasion.)

A half-empty box of The Happiest Days of Our Lives was on one side of us, a shipping container on the other, a stack of envelopes between us.

"This reminds me of when we did Dancing Barefoot," I said, as I struggled to put a book into an envelope.

"Me too" She said.

The book caught on the corner of the envelope, and tore it. For the third time. I crumpled it and threw it down into a growing pile of failed attempts.

"Except I don’t recall it being this tough to get the books into the envelopes." I said, "or maybe I just have stupid fingers today."

Ferris walked into the room, flopped down onto the rug next to Anne, and rolled onto her back.

"Someone is very happy to be with us in the living room," Anne said. Ferris wagged her tail in agreement: Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Ahem." I said. "I believe you mean ‘the shipping department.’"

She smiled.

"I like doing this with you again," she said.

I successfully worked the book into an envelope.

"Fourth time is the charm, I guess," I said.

"Go you." Anne said.

I turned the envelope over, and stuck a shipping label on the front side.

"This one’s going to Portland," I said. "That’s cool. I like Portland."

I put it with about several of its brothers into a shipping box, on loan from the United States Postal Service. I know that it’s on loan, because every flat surface on the box reminds me of this fact, and warns me against attempting anything ‘unauthorized’ with it. I will admit to spending a considerable amount of time pondering what sort of ‘unauthorized’ mayhem this box and I could have together. I wonder what kind of go-kart or fort it could make?

"You know what I love?" I said.

"Me?"

"Yes. You know what else I love?"

"Ferris?"

Thump. Thump. Thump.

"Yes. You know what else I love?"

We shared an impish look. Before she could answer, I said, "I love it that each of these books represents a person out there in the world who wants to read something I’ve written. Sending one box to a bookstore is one thing, but sending these directly to readers feel so much more . . ."

"Awesome?"

"I was going to say ‘real,’" I said, "but, yeah, ‘Awesome’ works, too."

I looked around me. My beautiful wife, my awesome dog, a box of books — my books, that I created — waiting to find their way into the hands and homes of people who want to read them.

"Yeah. This is awesome."

(Click to embiggen. Sent in by WWdN reader J.)