Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Reinventing the wheel

Blooming 'ell.  No sooner have we put our books at that place in Hwood (that I even advertised on Facebook - free publicity for them) and we add in a CD, and the "other" lady calls me and tells me we must pick up the CDs again - they don't want to sell CDs because of risk of theft.  But... they have other people's CDs there.

In the same breath she tells me that she'll give our books one more month and then we must pick them up because no copy has sold yet.  But I've seen clearly that there's one copy less of our small book than I left there on consignment.  What about that copy?  Was it stolen...?  

This right after the primary lady there and I were talking about launching something there next year.  

Well, who cares?  It's a cute place, I'm sure a launch would have been nice, but I'm sure there are hundreds of cute coffee places that would welcome the patronage of a launch, first and foremost Karoo Cafe who already hosted two of ours.  



It strikes me that I'm trying to reinvent the wheel.  By now I have a few pet hates where it comes to sales words:


  • "consignment"
  • "SOR"
  • "90 days" (both ways:  90 days for them to pay me, and 90 days for the books to be displayed before they are returned.)
"Them thar's fighting words!"

There are large book chains that pay cash upfront.  Time to talk to them.
I'm sorely tempted.... but never mind, all it means is that P'kaboo will have to look for sales avenues other than SOR, consignment and all that other rubbish.