When you sell a limited edition item such as the audio box set, are you only allowed to "print" the exact number you are to sell, or can you make extras if they break or get lost in shipping. If you can make extras and those are not needed, what happens to them once everything has been sent out and received by the customers?
It’s standard industry practice to overprint by 5-10%. So let’s use John’s TFIOS Audiobook box set as the example. We printed 3,300 box sets, even though the set is limited to 3,000 sales.
Those extra 300 boxes will get used in a few ways:
First, there will be some damaged in shipping and handling on their way to our warehouse. Probably 50-100 sets will have something damaged and need to be trashed upon arrival. Those never leave our warehouse and yes, DFTBA pays extra every month to have both garbage and recycling service. We recycle as much of the waste we create as possible.
Second, John will want to gift a few sets to people, and we never get those requests until things are sold out, of course. These gift sets go to his parents, his publisher, his editor, and others who were close to the book or audiobook project.
Third, a few sets will be set aside to be used in giveaways or fundraising efforts down the line. P4A gets a lot of these extras, and some go to fundraising campaigns run by friendly charities, like TSWGO or HPA.
Forth, I always keep three to five copies of almost every thing DFTBA releases. I keep these copies unused in storage boxes for posterity. I’ve done this for all of the projects I’ve been involved in since college. It’s nice having the physical things from these projects long after the projects are over and just a distant memory for most people. These projects are my life, my career, and I enjoy being able to revisit them.
And throughout all of the above, a dozen or two go to replacing packages that are lost or damaged in transit to customers (thankfully, these are rare occurrences). We usually keep these replacement extras around for 3-6 months, and then recycle any extras.
While packing today I tackled the CRATE of started-but-never-finished novels I like to tinker with from time to time. Check this opening line out:
“A town this size can go forty years without an unnatural death, then, in one morning, bam, you hit the daily double.”
I’m so good at opening lines. It’s always the second sentence that gives me trouble.
DFTBA.com is currently down due to a DDoS attack on the server. This is becoming more of a problem as we sign more and more larger personalities because with their huge communities, larger artists also attract more “haters”. What these attackers might not consider though is that DFTBA doesn’t only serve the Charles Trippys and vlogbrotherses of the internet world, we also work with numerous charities, educational projects, and artists who rely on their check from DFTBA every month to, like, eat and pay rent. So killing the site for a few hours to disrupt their target’s sales has a rippling effect across all our smaller scale artists too. Not the problem I wanted to spend my morning fixing.
Update: Hah, our server company just recommended DDoS protection at an additional $500/month. Yeah, that’s an awesome use of our IT budget. :/
Second Update: DFTBA should be back up now for most of you, and all of you within the next hour or two. One hour. That’s all they were able to take us down for. We’re getting good at this odd task of circumventing these attacks once they start.
(Also, a hat tip to our IT guy Sam for jumping on this 30 seconds after I emailed him about it.)
My kingdom for a tumblr plug-in that would allow me to upload photos from my local hard drive when reblogging someone else’s post. So frustrating.
New speakers for my future home theater arrived today - on a pallet! Driver arrived: “I have a pallet of speakers for you.”
“Yes. Yes you do.”
Yesterday I had a conference call with some employees at PayPal. They wanted to make sure DFTBA was happy, and discuss how PayPal could help with future business plans, and wanted to find out our secret sauce for continued growth year over year over year.
Anyway, when I called into the conference line, the recording instructed me to enter the conference room number “followed by the pound or hash sign”.
Sooo we’ve officially reached a point where the “pound sign” name is being replaced with the “hash” tag name. Weird weird weird! For the last 30 years that I’ve been alive it’s always been “followed by the pound sign”.
The future is weird and scary.
