Fulfilling orders.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I was wondering how various people fulfill customer orders from there websites. Things like lulu, and cafe press are pretty obvious  they handle it for you.
Regards, Seth

[Eero Tuovinen]

This is what we call an uncontextual poll. To make this an useful discussion, could you narrow it a bit? What kind of information do you need? What for? Do you have any notions of your own, or are you just asking for a general breakdown of options? That kind of thing helps us to be useful much better than just a short query.

That said, I push all the fulfilment work on my brothers, so I don't have to worry about it. In practice it's trips to the post office when we get orders, nothing fancier. I imagine that's the same for everybody who hasn't outsourced their fulfilment or got so successful they'd have to institute certain "mailing days" each week they'd spend solely in packaging and posting stuff.

If that wasn't very useful, it's probably because I don't know what the discussion is about.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

For the most part I was just looking for the options and trying to find the most effective way. I supposed another thing I wonder is  about how much product should you have on hand at a time, and what is theeasiest most effectiveway to store books.
Regards, Seth

[Josh Roby]

I supposed another thing I wonder is  about how much product should you have on hand at a time, and what is theeasiest most effectiveway to store books.

Stock on hand needs to be determined by a few factors -- (a) how many units you expect to sell, (b) how quickly you expect to sell them, and (c) how quickly you can refresh your stock by manufacturing more.  Especially when you're starting out, (a) and (b) are incredibly rough conjectures, but you can nail down (c) pretty easily, so start there.  Some folks post their yearly sales on this board or in their blogs; you might want to check out their numbers (and divide by two or three, as you're a new author) and base your expectations off of those.  In general, you want to keep your stock on hand low -- you are tying up assets (both money and space) in the form of manufactured product, assets that could be invested elsewhere where they'll see a return.

As for storing books, you want to keep them somewhere dry and temperature-neutral.  Excess heat can screw with the binding glue; extreme cold can actually screw with the ink (although this is hard to do outside of freezing temperatures).  Also pay attention to humidity -- that closet in the laundry room, for instance, is a bad, bad idea cause the moisture will warp the books.  Similarly, the closet that shares a wall with the bathroom may also be dangerous.  Don't store the boxes on the ground, ever; you never know what spill or flood or broken water heater is going to sweep in and ruin the bottom four copies.  If you trust your manufacturer, keep them in their original, unopened packaging until you need to crack open a box and send them out; if you don't, open up all the boxes and inspect the copies and then try and fit them back inside the boxes they came in.  Seal them back up with packing tape; you really do need to worry about bugs.  Unless you have small boxes or high sales traffic, seal them after you open them every time (or pull out stack, fulfill orders with those over the next week, and leave the rest safe inside the box).  If they're hardcover, store them with their spines horizontal.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'll speak to the actual effort of fulfilment. My experience is, the first 100 copies are a joy to send. You package them, you send them, you're excited about the order, you feel good about seeing them go into the post, and it's all good.

After that, it's a horrible nightmare of chores and inconvenience. Words cannot express how awful it is.

You should understand that you can set up a contract with the POD company itself, for them to do the fulfilment. However, some of them are much better than others about this (which might not be correlated with their competence as printers), and all of them are small-staff companies and subject to unexpected screwups. I have not yet found one with a financial arrangement for this service that suits me.

You can also contract with a fulfilment company. Many of them are, frankly, predatory on small-press publishers and I do not consider them viable options. In my view, the only solid options are Key 20 and Indie Press Revolution, who are both very professional and absolutely suited to the needs of an independent publisher.

Best,
Ron

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I was thinking of trying out http://www.booksjustbooks.com/ they seem like a very good service the only problem is its not worth using them unless your going to purchse about 3,000 books. What I am thinking is sell through lulu for about a year to get some hype up around the game and then switch over to books just books. Would some thing like this be a logical idea or is it easier for a small press to stick with print on demand services.
Regards, Seth

[guildofblades]

Well, we collect our purchase orders together and batch process them just once or twice a week. More time efficient that way.

As for storage, we have a row of metal shelves that form a type of U shape, basically with shelves on three sides. We keep between 20 and 100 units of each game on these shelves ready for shipping at any time. That way when it comes time to package up orders we can take an order sheet or two, walk down that row and grab all the games needed for those orders. Then we have a packaging table where we can place these items and stuff them in a box. Packaging peanuts, foam, packaging paper, tape and folded boxes are stored nearby. Then we have another table for placing the finnished packages on.

For speed of packaging, I also recommend printing up a bunch of return address labels in advance and keeping them nearby.

I would keep between 25 and 100 books shelved and ready to be packaged in this manner, regardless if you have one title, ten or fifty. The rest you can put into deeper storage abd pull out to stock your shelves as needed. But the ideal number you should keep at the ready really depends on your weekly/monthly sales volumes. Adjust accordingly per title.

Otherwise, what others have mentioned is good. Keep in a dry place. In sealed boxes is better.  Up and away from potential water flood places or places where water could drip or leak. Moist places can lead to warping and mildew.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

[Michael S. Miller]

What I am thinking is sell through lulu for about a year to get some hype up around the game and then switch over to books just books.

Starting small is always better. You don't lose so much if you make a mistake. I have no experience with booksjustbooks, but the prices on their home page look much better than Lulu. On the other hand, Lulu requires no up-front investment or storage, IIRC. I'm not sure why you cite 3,000 copies as their point of affordibility, unless you're committed to full color. Full color from anywhere is going to be expensive and I doubt it will sell that many more books. Start small. You can always put out a full color deluxe edition later.

[Troy_Costisick]

Starting small is always better. You don't lose so much if you make a mistake.

-Michael speaks much wisdom.  Please reread his entire post.

Peace,

-Troy

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I intended to start small and I was going to switch over to a traditional printing once demand was higher. I wrote that 3,000 was the best point to start buying from them because that is pretty much the highest discount.


For example:
purchasing a hundred 300 page 6*9 softcover books will cost $8.55 per book $13.58 hardcover
now the same at 3,000 books the price per book drops down to $1.95 a per book. $3.57 for hard covers

[Eero Tuovinen]

Remember that a lower price-point on expenses is not helpful if you don't sell those books. Also, be aware that 3000 is HUGE for roleplaying game sales. I couldn't imagine selling that many of one game, myself, especially after starting with smaller printings. I couldn't imagine the best rpg designers I know selling that many, actually. The ones who do are rather different businesses. So you'd be sitting for years on a pile of books in an industry where the product turn-over happens in months, unless you're really good. With the prices you quoted you still have to sell six times better to justify the larger printing. If you had to sell, say, 50 copies of the smaller printing to break even (if you sold for $20 or so, just to coin a number), that'd mean selling 300 to break even on the larger one. At that point you'd be 150 copies in profit if you did three smaller printings, instead. The larger printing will be more cost-efficient only after you've sold 600 copies. That would take me 6-8 years of non-stop success (how many games stay current for a decade?) assuming the marketing channels I use for my projects, and make the game the second-biggest Finnish roleplaying game. If we factor in the cost of warehousing and assume we double the small printing size after the first one (as the game seems to sell so well), I imagine we're looking at selling a thousand books before the economies of size start to matter. And that's with the numbers you supplied; I think it's likely that you can get better offers for the small printing, if you shop around.

Not that you're going to print 3000 copies. This is just to emphasize what Michael wrote, he has teh wise. And it's not even on topic.

[Bryan Hansel]

All great points mentioned above.  I think you might also want to think about this issue.  Shipping to you on 300 to 3000 books is pretty significant, so you need to add that into your products cost, and then you have to add in the time you're going to spend shipping these out.  At the prices that you've quoted, lulu.com seems to me like the really winner here.  They fulfill your order, there is no inventory, and no upfront investment. 

If you look at Dog in the Vineyards (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18323.0)direct physical copy sales, you'll see around 300 sold last year.  After looking around at the different sales numbers posted by other indie companies this seems like a pretty good number.  So, let's say you manage to sell 150 to 200 your first year, you'll start to see some profit as mentioned at about 140 ($20).  Meanwhile, you've invested $2700 after shipping for your first print run, you've put in time each week packaging, shipping, gas money to get to the post, etc....

With lulu,  if you sell that same 140 books, you'll have made $2841 without having to do any shipping work.  Plus, because you didn't tie up your $2700, you managed to slip that into a nice 4.4% 15 month CD and earn the interest.  Plus, halfway through the year you stuff $1400 in a 4% 6 month CD.  At this point, you've almost made the same amount of profit on lulu.com on 300 books as you did from the other place without having to spend a dime on product costs.

BTW, Lulu drops down to $7.91 plus shipping for a print run of 300.

Something that you might want to consider is letting your customers chose if they want to order the book directly from you or from Lulu, and give them an incentive to use Lulu, so you don't have to deal with the shipping hassle (i.e. direct orders take 6-8 weeks to ship, Lulu takes 2 weeks).  Maybe keep 10 or so copies on hand at anytime to sell direct if they want to purchase directly from you.

Bryan

[Seth M. Drebitko]

Thank you all for your help I think I have gotten about as much as I will from this thread.
I have decided to stick with lulu for normal books sales on the internet.
For sales at conventions, or to distributors I am thinking of using another service and taking orders directly from the distributors.
I have also decided that at some point I will also most likely do a one time only run of limited edition hardcover versions of the book. I will hand sign each and then send them out not selling them for about $5 more than the soft covers, and then auctioning the last ten most likely.
Regards, Seth