With Writing Show host, Paula B.

DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO “HOW NOT TO RUN AN ONLINE BOOKSTORE, EPISODE 5″ MP3 HERE

Actually, this chapter isn’t just about the post office. It’s about how we got our books to our customers, but because the post office looms so large in this little drama, I’ve paid that inscrutable institution the compliment of naming the chapter after them.

The reason the post office is so important is pretty obvious: getting your packages through their system is essential to doing business. You can use UPS or FedEx if you like, but unless you’re the size of Amazon, you can’t get attractive-enough rates to make it worthwhile. The post office is more reasonably priced, but beware: if your package weighs more than a pound, you can’t just dump it in a mail box. You have to hand it to a clerk. But that’s only one of many rubs.

There are essentially two aspects to getting books to customers: packing them and shipping them. I wonder how many people have thought through how this actually happens. It’s true that there’s little reason to care. Most of us who have bought books online have placed our order and thought nothing of it when the book has turned up a few days later. Even if you’ve sold a few used books online, you may not realize just how much careful planning and execution are involved, and things still often go wrong, sometimes badly.

The first shock we got when trying to figure out a system was the discovery that books are actually quite fragile. Hardbacks fare only a bit better than paperbacks. Books can end up with bashed corners, scratched and folded covers, and torn pages, just from shipping. When you handle them before shipping, they get dirty, scratched, and worn. Leave them on the shelf for a while, and they start to get frazzled from the movement of books around them. Heavy books are particularly difficult because there’s no way to handle them gracefully. Books with CDs in them, well, forget it. The discs are easily cracked, and since no one can tell they’re broken until the customer opens the CD envelope, you’re the one who ends up bearing the blame for the damage. We ordered 5 copies of one particularly heavy game development book that included a CD and had to return 4 of them. The other one made its way to a customer who informed us that he was very disappointed to have received a broken disk. We immediately made him a copy from one of the others we had in stock and ripped open a fresh disk from another of our new books and sent both to him. Publishers—listen up. Please don’t put CDs in 3-inch thick books!

In fact, don’t publish 3-inch thick books. Have you ever tried to read one of those things? No wonder they call them doorstops. If there’s that much content that’s really of use, divide the thing into two volumes. They’re impossible to use, and a nightmare to ship. Even using media mail, which I’ll talk about in a minute, a bookseller will spend $5, and if you’re offering free shipping, that’s a large portion of your margin. To ship one of those books via priority mail, you’re probably going to spend about $15—almost as much as the book costs. Does that make any sense?

Here’s another consideration most people don’t think about: water damage. It doesn’t have to be raining for a package to get wet. Delivery people can put stuff where it can get hosed or sprinkled. Since you never know what could happen on the receiving end of a shipment, you should always waterproof the contents of a package. If you don’t, you could have unhappy customers and a lot more work processing returns.

Continues....

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