Opera wrap up, Ehrenreich sales pop wishes, Credit Card dreams

1. Hurray for opera. We had 32 people at our Florentine Opera preview last night. Doesn't sound huge, but it was in fact bigger than Schwartz had done in the past. Really great event--the performers were wonderful and Corliss Phillabaum was a wonderful narrator. I can't wait for Elmer Gantry in February. You're going to read it along with me for our in-store book club, right?

2. When you subscribe to this blog by feed, it delays by 15 hours. I've got to fix that, but so far, I don't know how. Anyone have any ideas that don't cost anything?

3. Ticket sales on Ehrenreich are slow! We need to sell 300 seats to break even and we're well behind that. We're underwriting on WUWM and WMSE (note to WHAD, I promise to use you for another project!) and placing an ad in this Sunday's Journal Sentinel. We've contacting university departments and nonprofits. The book's gotten a lot of attention, Ehrenreich's a great speaker, and the ticket is reasonably priced, to my thinking. Ehrenreich is still getting 250+ people at events that aren't as heavily promoted. Any ideas on how to spread the word? Note: the budget is pretty much used up, so I'm not talking $$. Buy tickets to Ehrenreich here.

4. Five hints for me to delete messages without opening them.
--I've won anything
--A great list of dentists
--More than one exclamation point in the subject line.

I got all three this morning.

5. Today's project--make progress towards taking credit cards on our web site. Yeeks.