An Unpleasant Trip to the Post Office
I’m unusual in that I have many positive associations with the post office. My grandfather was a postman professionally, and my dad worked for the post office during college.
I have never worked for the post office, but I work with them regularly, if not as regularly as I would like. That’s because a big part of Nathan Rabin Incorporated involves selling signed books through this site’s store and then sending them to people who have purchased them directly from me.
I associate the post office with spending an enormous amount of money on postage. This was particularly true of the Weird Accordion to Al ‘s crowd-funding campaign, for which I stupidly and arbitrarily set the shipping cost for international orders at eight dollars.
It costs about twenty-three dollars to send a single book to Canada to give you a sense of how foolish and short-sighted that was. I remember spending close to a hundred dollars to send three books to Australia that, again, I charged eight dollars to ship.
I lost thousands of dollars shipping books all around the world.
I similarly am not crazy about the enormous amount of time and energy that fulfilling crowd-funding campaigns and selling books through my store involves. But I LOVE the fact that I am still publishing books long after my old, big, respectable publisher Scribner parted ways with me about a decade back. I’m proud that hundreds of people pledge to every crowd-funding campaign I run, and I am super happy to be sending books that I’ve sold to people who have bought them and are excited to read them.
It’s a very hard, not particularly lucrative, way to not make much of a living. And I’m one of the lucky ones! I’ve got a name, a reputation, and a whole library of books you can buy. One of my books was co-written by “Weird Al” Yankovic. I wrote for The A.V Club for 18 years and The Dissolve for almost two years. And I still find it incredibly difficult to sell books independently.
Making money publishing books independently just got a whole lot harder. Last week, I went to the post office in my new neighborhood to send out the one book I’d sold through the site in the last month.
I did not have my headphones on so I could drown out the world and its noise, so I was feeling very dysregulated. Then, I had to wait in line for a solid hour.
It was at that point that I discovered that the price of Media Mail had skyrocketed.
Four years ago, when I sent out a lot of books for the Weird Accordion to Al campaign, it cost three dollars and seventeen cents to ship a book through media mail.
Today, media mail starts at four dollars and eighty-seven cents. That’s nearly five dollars, a forty percent increase over just a few years ago.
“No!!!” I cried out loud to the poor woman behind the counter. I hadn’t realized that the price of media mail had gone up because I assumed that I was shipping more books, and that’s why it cost more.
Media mail is a huge part of my business, and it’s gone way up lately.
For the last four years or so, I have charged zero dollars for shipping on any book sold through the store. I also did not charge for taxes, which are a huge expense.
To make things even stupider, I would give away a free “Weird Al” Yankovic coloring book with every order.
I sold my books cheap and gave away shipping, taxes, and a free coloring book with each order, and I still sold almost nothing. I’ve sold about five books through the store this year.
More or less, giving away my books didn’t work. At all.
So, I’ve decided to go in the opposite direction. Starting with The Fractured Mirror’s release around the start of August, I will start charging four dollars for shipping on every order. I also won’t do that thing where I drop prices dramatically for a promotion and then never return them to normal rates.
The Fractured Mirror is an absolute beast. It’s as big as two books, and I spent close to a decade researching and writing it.
I’m going to charge twenty-four dollars plus four dollars for shipping for The Fractured Mirror. It’s worth it. I’m also going to stop giving out free copies of The Weird A-Coloring to Al because nobody seems to know I’m doing it, and I’m guessing at least some of the people who bought my other books have no interest in “Weird Al” Yankovic.
I’m doing this partially because the cost of printing books independently has also gone up tremendously.
Thanks, Obama.
I am pleased to report that I am going to start charging more money for my books. I’ll also be charging for shipping.
I’m not worried about selling fewer books that way because it would legitimately take tremendous effort to be less successful than I am now.
So, if you would still like to take advantage of free shipping and taxes and a free coloring book with each shipment, put in your order before August 1st. That’s the day that everything changes, and I start valuing myself and my work. Maybe if I get the ball rolling, the universal will follow suit.
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