Monday, February 28, 2011

Letting Sleeping Books Lie

Wow – I feel like I’m back from the dead. I know I wrote on Friday, but even that seems like a long time ago. I’m doing better, but am still not on top of my game. I just decided today though that enough is enough. The plan is to finish this post, add a handful of books, upload them to all my venues, and go to the antiques mall with the box of books I’d planned to take last Monday before I got derailed. It’s amazing to realize that I have not set foot outside the door in eight days!

I was just thinking about that when the phone rang this morning and a bookseller friend whom I haven’t talked to for three weeks since she had knee surgery called to let me know she was finally home. Listening to her story of surgery and rehab jolted me back to the reality that when it comes to having something to complain about I’m not even in the minor leagues. I’ve had spells of being out of the groove before of course, but this one not only knocked me for a loop but seemed to come out of nowhere. Still -- no whining allowed. It could be much worse.

The weekend brought us a visit from our oldest daughter and her family which means we had our grandsons, ages seven and 20 months, from Saturday afternoon through Sunday. I love when the kids are here, but I really didn’t have what it took to be the granny with the “mostest” this weekend. Normally I run around, play a million games, pick up the baby, dance with the baby, make homemade muffins, scrambled eggs and fruit salad for Sunday breakfast and spend pre-breakfast hours with the oldest doing whatever he dreams up for me. This time I had to really push to do anything and even then was a pale shadow of my normal self – which means the kids made their own fun, especially the little one who learned to turn on both the dishwasher AND the DVD player, examined the contents of every drawer and cupboard on the first floor, and pulled as many books off the shelves as he could possibly wedge out. He had both parents flying around like bats in the summer trees, while I sat back chuckling to myself at how much interference I normally run without even realizing it.

Sales, however, began to drop by mid week and remained lackluster from there forward. I had two fairly good ones though – one for a four volume set on the history of nursing from 1903 (my secret site) and one for a half dozen Mazo De La Roche Jalna novels in the Whiteoak edition WITH the dustjackets ( ABE). The latter should have been a slam dunk since they were headed to the author’s native Canada, but the buyer refused the required postage despite the mention in the listing that extra shipping was required for a multi-volume set. If this is happening now – and it is with greater frequency, or so it seems to me anyway – I hate to see what will happen this spring when the new rates kick in. Thankfully, the one thing that still churned out sales with consistency was the antiques mall – I had a very good week after a lackluster start to the month.

It has been my experience that to keep online sales active it’s necessary to list at least every other day. The more you slow it down, the slower sales will be. The thing is, it doesn’t take much to get the whole shebang going again. Add a couple today, add a couple tomorrow and in a day or so you’re firing on all cylinders again, wither you sell the new stuff or you don’t. I know this, I even planned to DO this, but somehow never forced myself to follow through. Partly it was because I was a little gun-shy from screwing up the magazines the morning I woke with the flare. I thought for sure I’d get into something over my fuzzy head and opted instead to let sleeping books lie.

But now it’s time for sleeping books to wake up and get cracking. So I am off to try my hand at rousing them and then head over to the antiques mall. I missed you all very much, but had nothing to talk about. Truly nothing, which is highly unusual for me. I could talk to a post about anything most of time. This time I couldn’t even post.

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