We’ve been relying on people overseas doing contributions on the honor system to cover extra postage, but, whoa, all of a sudden we got hit by people doing purchases from overseas with no postage. Well, I don’t blame them, and we will honor the offering, (it’s costing us more to ship than we’ll make on the transaction) but—we have to manage this fast, since we started to do dead tree books now and again. So we have to put a postage charge on.
IF you want to buy multiple dead tree books, for one thing, do it now, because we don’t have many of them, and for another thing—if you’re getting multiple purchases, we can sometimes cut you a deal on shipping, by working it out by hand how to cram it into one box. In any situation, wherever you live if what you’re ordering is small, or flat, and you can contact us in advance of purchase, we can see if we can cram whatever it is into one of those larger flat-rate boxes and save you a bit of change. One 45.00 box is better than four 13.95 boxes to the opposite side of the planet. And we’re very willing to work with you. Just don’t buy it until you write to us because our software is very limited, and we can work with you easily BEFORE a purchase and tell you how to finesse it.
Bookplate sales are modest but ongoing: if I make a mistake or they don’t arrive in good condition don’t hesitate to tell me. It’s one thing to tell the software what to ask you: it’s another to read the input in the right way.
And note: bookplates ship in an ordinary first class envelope, and there’s no extra postage for overseas: I can at least give my overseas readers that much of a break!
Have you looked into media mail? And don’t forget M-bags if there is a number of items to a single address.
Don’t be afraid to charge for profit and for postage. Even if you may be on a quite restrictive diet you deserve to eat.
I agree with NosenDive – you should pass the expenses on to the customer. We expect it, and you should not subsidize our reading habit any more than you do by writing it.
THank you all: we do use media mail in the US, where useful, but it doesn’t exist overseas.
We appreciate your support.
Ummmm…when I make purchases from my suppliers I pay the shipping fees. It’s part of doing business. I don’t think you would get a lot of hassle if you also charged a small packing fee. Your time is valuable! If I should have to ship work I charge the cost of postage and a packing fee. My stuff is fragile and has to be carefully packed. No one has ever complained about this.
COMPLETELY OTS: I notice Lynn has not posted anything since early Feb. Toes crossed that all is well with her.
Lynn has had an ongoing zoo of a situation. She’s working to get out from under, but say that a national organization of some antiquity, of which she is a past officer, has had a crisis of major proportions re their national convention, and it somehow landed in her lap. Does she get anything at all out of this? Nada. It’s that business of being unable to watch a total train wreck that could greatly damage the organization when she knows what switches to throw. Add several local emergencies and other matters concurrent with this situation, and she’s been putting out fires while trying to keep her basic focus. It’s not been easy. But she is doing her Seeking North segment and hopes to post soon.
I’ve noticed that often Lynn seems to get tapped to assist in fire-fighting, even when she should be safely off the hook (mixed metaphors, anyone?) I hope the crisis is soon safely averted and she can return to her own concerns.
Shipping and handling is entirely legit and expected. My first job out of college (well, if you don’t count the two weeks at Vermont’s worst Burger King on record) was as a shipper (until I fled the real world of work a year later to go get my Masters at the University of Edinburgh). You can charge a flat rate that will cover, say, shipping from the west coast to the east coast, as well as a bit of handling, and make a profit on sites in-between. That’s the easiest. You can also do a graduated rate based on a handling charge and what it actually costs you to ship each specific order’s weight of stuff that far, but I’m suspect that would mean you would be billing the buyer after you have assembled the package, not up front. I suppose you could do a graduated weight per number of books and what state or zone the person is in, but really — setting out a flat rate inclu. handling which you know will cover most of your costs/book for most of the states (abroad fees should be more or retroactively charged) would be the best for all, I suspect.
Some businesses charge a flat rate per book/piece shipped, and some charge by weight. I expect this. (Some even have options with different prices, but always suggest the least expensive option.)
Instead of doing a price change, couldn’t you simply create for each PBook an “additional product”, with additional overseas shipping charges included ? Call it the books “Overseas edition” 🙂 In the description you could explain your shipping policy , and telling the customer to contact you for “group” ordering etc. Of course fixing an appropriate shipping price may not be easy, but still, you should be able to recoup the shippiong price into the total one.
We thought of that, but since there’s no way to be sure somebody buys that ‘additional product’ before giving us money for the item, we ended up creating 3 different prices, one for the states, one for Canada/Mexico, and one for everywhere else. We’re guided somewhat by what we can get our (free) software to do. And we think that people who may be puzzled by the intricacies of shipping will at least get the notion that they do not want their book to end up short of its destination, so they should buy the book that will get to their region.
Why on earth would people be surprised that it costs more to ship outside your resident country? Your fans, being the forward-thinking lot they are 😉 have probably bought stuff on ebay or amazon and likely encountered this. I further doubt that fans would object to ponying up for special handling, i.e. buying direct from the authors.
Oh, listen, I get really angry letters from people morally outraged that our books aren’t .99 and occasionally an angry letter from someone who insults us seven ways from Sunday but who wants to take over our marketing and teach us how to do it. If you market online you just meet all sorts. And I can see somebody overseas who punches the button to buy and then doesn’t get any info about shipping—that’s not their fault. But we’ve fixed that. We just weren’t prepared for the mental transition between selling downloads, which don’t have a shipping problem, to selling actual physical things, which do. Cafe Press (you HAVE to have one of our t-shirts!) of course handles all that, so this is a brave new world for us.
You guys had never sold stuff on eBay? I’m truly surprised, thought everybody had at some time or another.
‘Course, eBay will automatically compute overseas shipping costs as well.
Yes, it does, but if you want the cheapest option internationally you have to bypass the automatic calculations and do it yourself.
No, we had far too much trouble with phishing and identity on Ebay.
As a resident of South Korea, I do indeed pay a premium to have stuff shipped here from the States. And as others have said, I don’t expect Closed Circle to have to take a hit for me just because I’m geographically…inconvenient. Just letting you know there’s another such vote out here. Or over here.
Angry letters? That’s outrageous! It’s beyond me that anyone could feel rightly justified about yours or Jane’s prices. Far as I’m concerned, I’m getting excellent value for money at Closed Circle. And how you choose to market your stuff, well that’s your business, no one else’s.
Absolutely I’m happy to pay postage and handling commensurate to the actual cost of getting items to me here way ‘downunder’.
Now if only major publishers would find themselves able to make their ebooks available outside the US, I’d be a happier girl. These ‘geographic restrictions’ are a real pain… (apologies for rant on pet subject).
I think part of that has to do with publishing rights, not mindless regionalism and people not wanting to take your money. The same book can be published by different publishers and if American X starts selling ebooks in Australian X’s turf… Of course there are always ways of getting DTBs from all over, but the shipping hassle there can be prohibitive enough they never fought over that. Open ebooks up to cross pollinating and you’ll damage your own local industry. Do you want an American company to get the business or a local one? Of course it is up to the local company to get ebooks out there. It is a tricky subject and I want to say “ebooks for all”… but with local industries in mind that will be doing a lot of painful business landscaping that likely won’t benefit your country.
It is interesting that this is typically an English language issue since English is “region free” for many people. For many people the language they read IS mostly based in their own country and that is where they would be doing business rather than looking and what other people have.
They explain it better here.
I can’t get Jasper Fforde’s YA book even though it has been out in English for ages now. I have to wait til the end of the year. So annoying since it is in English and just waiting to be read … but that’s how it goes.
I fully agree with everybody here, paying for shipping and handling is normal, it’s absolutely unwelcome for our favourite authors to take a loss because we’d like to buy a paper book direct from them. We want to keep you in the business of writing books for us to read, which means you have to be able to live on your income from the book sales!
Even with the shipping costs, paying the ordinary US price in dollars does NOT cost me any more than buying a book in a bookshop here. In a (relatively) small language there are less buyers so the overhead has to be spread over a smaller amount of book sales, and the price of books is higher than with the larger volume English/American editions; imported foreign books always have postage & handling and VAT & import tax and sometimes older dollar-to-euro conversion charts or whatever added into their standard price so they’re generally no cheaper than the nationally-published books.
So there’s absolutely no need to apologize to your foreign readers for your very fair prices.
@ sweetbo: Yes, but …
There’s a difference between bookshops and publishers which appears to fade out in the E-book rights discussion.
I buy my paper books in a (fairly) local bookshop instead of over the Internet, just to support the bookshop, even though it will often cost a bit more than buying direct. But I read a lot of English and very little Dutch, so almost all the books I read are published and produced in England and the USA. My bookstore in Amsterdam can order paper books from both these countries, without any restrictions: I can choose to buy an American edition of Harry Potter or an English edition of CJ’s books, just because I prefer a certain cover or a way of spelling or because one edition comes out sooner than another…
If this worked the same for E-books, I’d be fine with that. That would mean I’d have to order them through my ‘local’ online bookstore, probably Amazon.co.uk (in England) or Amazon.de (in Germany), or maybe Bol.com (in Holland, if I could request them to order it for me when it’s not in their regular inventory), but I could buy an E-book that was published by an American publishing company.
Why isn’t that allowed?
Technically it should be possible, as Amazon already knows where I live in order to send me a paper book, and thus restricts me from buying Kindle books in the UK store because I don’t live in the UK.
So it should be possible to restrict me from buying any E-books on Amazon.com, but make the whole E-book collection available to me through a European online bookstore.
If I prefer to read CJ’s books in the original American spelling, why would I have to wait for an English publisher to bring out an English E-book edition in the English spelling (if one chooses to do so), that he’s licensed to produce in Europe? It means that the right to produce a book somewhere is now being interpreted for digital books as a sort of limit on what I can buy to read, so that I can buy and read only that ‘European’ edition because I live in Europe!
Not being able to buy a book I want to read, from a foreign author and publisher, will not make me spend more money on Dutch books and publishers as they just don’t produce books that I’d like to read.
So the argument for regionality holds some water in regard to bookstores (even digital ones, considering shipping), but not that much for publishers, in my experience.
Maybe it’s different in the commercial struggle between English and American publishers, and maybe Australian an Canadian as well, where there’s more overlap in what they publish; but for the non-english-speaking world it just seems like unwarranted censorship compared to what’s usual for paper books.
Digital books, in this sense, seem to be modelled more on the movies and DVDs with their regions. Those have been censored since they started.
I’ve been told those restrictions were put in because the producers couldn’t cope with delivering to the whole world at once when they started producing videos and DVDs, and would release things region-by-region; and it seems utterly pointless to me now when you’re talking about digital files delivered over the Internet.
For instance this means I cannot try to buy and watch any of the anime CJ and others on this blog are so enthousiastic about, because no European-region editions are available. Buying them from their current production company does not diminish the sales of the local producer, as there isn’t one, and none seem likely to pick up on it soon. So what’s the point of making it impossible for me to buy them at all? That benefits nobody.
Getting off my soapbox now. I know the industry won’t change for my opinions, but as it’s in such flux just now I hope the E-book publishers, and mostly the digital-rights lawyers, will get some sense sometime in the foreseeable future.