A Day in the Life of an Email Newsletter--One Run, Two Errors, Lots of Hits (I Hope)

I guess you could call it our summer break.  Every summer, I miss a week here or there for the email newsletter. I know we're not the only bookstore to be a wee bit inconsistent in our mailings, but it is pretty important to get the message out on events.

 

So work started on this week's newsletter about...a week ago. We finally got it out today.  And then:

a. A customer immediately noticed a day-date discrepancy, important enough that we needed to do a correction.

b. In the course of getting the email newsletter together, we ran out of George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons, our first highlighted book.  We bought a lot of copies (for us), but our signed copies didn't come with the rest of our initial shipment.  And though we have a good track record now, we are still sometimes caught unawares by the strength of our sales in science fiction and fantasy.  And Martin is super hot right now.  We've got more shipments coming in tomorrow and Friday.  For now, we're taking names.

In the age of ebook immediacy, one wonders how long folks will wait for a book. Eh, I thought we'd lose all our special orders too, but we still seem to have plenty, and we're grateful to wholesalers and publishers for getting them to us quickly. I guess we'll see how the business changes.

Amusing aside--in the course of writing our correction, I received an email newsletter correction from another bookstore. 

Here's a link to this week's email newsletter. Don't forget that Edward Janus is coming to the Milwaukee Public Library for Creating Dairyland on Tuesday, July 19, 6:30 pm.