9:23pm August 17, 2014

It’s ready: SignedBooksDirect.com

When we started offering autographed / personalized books at Ebooks Direct, we had no idea we were going to get such an enthusiastic response. So we’ve decided to swing out a little.

One of the problems with being a career writer is that your authors’ copies start to pile up. Normally, every time a book comes out, your publisher sends you ten copies of it — sometimes more, depending on your contract. Every time there’s a new edition of a given book, you get more copies. Foreign editions, specialty editions… more copies.

Take two writers with sixty or seventy novels between them, and put them and all their authors’ copies together in the same small house, and eventually you come to a fairly predictable conclusion:

NOBODY NEEDS THIS MANY COPIES OF THEIR OWN BOOKS!

But what we do need is the space that all these book boxes are taking up.

At the same time, we both keep finding notes in our email and our ask boxes from people who prefer solid, hold-it-in-your-hand, dead-tree books to ebooks. And notes from people who don’t want a new book: they want a new copy of that old book they read/loved to death years back, the book they read till the bindings broke and the pages fell out. Don’t think we don’t know how that is.

…With these thoughts in mind, Peter and I looked at all these boxes full of our books, some of them now hard to find in good condition — or indeed any condition — and the light bulbs came on over our heads.

As a result, SignedBooksDirect.com is now open. Think of it as a garage sale with autographs.

At the moment there are nearly forty different editions of various books in there, and many more will follow over the next week or two. Some of them are seriously rare (and I’m afraid their prices have to reflect that). Some aren’t quite so rare, but finding them in good condition is tough. The strong point, however, is that all of them will come to the buyer autographed and personalized in whatever way you prefer. It’s the least we can do.

Right now the stuff in there is mostly mine, as Peter is still going through his own inventory and determining what he wants to release. Also to follow next week will be more Star Trek stuff and a bunch of non-English-language foreign editions of all kinds (Dutch, Japanese, Russian…) from both of us. If you’re interested, you can keep an eye on what’s available by visiting the inventory collection at the store or adding this Atom/RSS feed link to your feed reader — it’ll let you know when something new arrives.

One other note: When we were offering books through Ebooks Direct, because of the way the shop’s fulfillment process works when handling digital data, in order to keep from confusing it we had to offer books with the shipping charges included in the book price; and even so there was no way to keep it from instantly marking orders as “fulfilled” on payment (which it does with ebooks). This pair of situations occasionally caused some really annoying problems with filling physical-book orders in a timely manner, because we would think things had gone out when they hadn’t. Fortunately, since the new store is geared wholly toward physical objects, this doesn’t have to happen any more. Books’ shipping charges are now calculated separately, by weight, at checkout, and fullfilment is done by hand for each item when it’s on the way to the post office. So there’s one less thing to worry about. (Well, two, actually.)

Anyway: have a look through there, see if there’s anything you like the look of. And perhaps you’d like to spread the word around a bit. We wouldn’t complain. :)