Phew, that’s Marketing Week over and done for another month! I think I’ve drunk enough coffee to sink a ship!
This week was the week of scheduling all the books to print for Christmas. Things take a lot longer than you’d think and I’ll mention the fact that I am now in full Christmas mode three months early!!
As a business we’re in a funny place at the moment: we’re getting the word out about us, building our list and selling books which is great. We have people saying nice things about us as a business and are being invited to industry events (Futurebook Conference – hooray!). We’re not quite successful enough to be rolling around in money, or to build our team, or to be able to pay for external help, however.
And in true control freak style, I get worried because I know all the things we’re not doing so good at. We need to work harder at getting reviews for our books, we need to improve the length of time it takes to work through submissions (though to be fair we do read every single one and respond to every single one as well). We could automate more as far as accounting and IT go (though we do loads already which does save hours of work), and we need to expand the number of bookstore who are actually stocking our books.
But I think its good to worry about this stuff. Complacency would be a bigger problem – because then we’d never keep trying. And we are trying, really hard, and we keep achieving miracles – like being invited to the Bookseller Futurebook Conference when we’re so new to the industry!
Right – back to my current reading. “Excel 365 Bible”. The book must be nearly three inches thick… I think I’m getting carpul tunnel!!
