Pete at the Arc

Pete at the Arc,
originally uploaded by skyring.

John Martin writes the "Capital Circle" column in the local paper, and he's featured me (and other local BookCrossers) before. I sent him a snippet about Wikimapia, mentioning since I'd seen him last I'd been around the world a couple of times. He picked up on that, pumped me for info and here's the result. He got a few things wrong, but for some reason he liked the photograph.

This morning I was called out of the shower to answer a phone call from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the official national broadcaster, for an interview slot on Friday at 1045.

In other news, CoffeeBron has joined up on LJ and we arranged a minimeet at Valerie Parv's coffee shop on Thursday at 1500.

Valerie, by a remarkable coincidence, will be featured on Capital Circle tomorrow.

The drought ends

A while back, I realised that posting books overseas was a pretty marginal affair for me. Like as not I went backwards on the postage. Even though I was charging $US9 for the post, it was often more than that for economy air rate, which takes up to a month.

So I bumped up my postage to $US11 and waited for the money to come rolling in.

Which it didn't. Instead, orders from the USA evaporated to virtually nothing.

So after a long drought, I changed my rate back to $US9.75 to see if anything changed.

Two US orders came in yesterday. Apparently $US10 is some sort of magic level for ordering. Pay more than $10 for postage from the far side of the world and it's no longer fun. Fair enough, I suppose, as a lot of my books are about $US3 and who wants to spend nearly three times as much on postage?

But pretty rough on me, because the margins on books that cheap aren't terribly high, and if I spend a couple of dollars extra on postage, I'm going backwards on the deal, which is no way to run a business.

Worse news is that come September, Australia Post is scrapping the Economy Air rate entirely, which means that I'll have to send books overseas via Airmail (or surface mail, which can take up to three months) and that's going to be even more expensive. It's not just the postage cost - I've got to factor in the packaging and the time it takes me to pull a book, run it through the paperwork, ack it up in bubblewrap and write the address. And trundle down to the PO.

I think I might have to bump my minimum price up to $US4, which may have an impact on sales as well.

In other news, one of the two US sales was for a book on Fijiian Medicinal Plants, which went for $US60. Postage to the US was $AUS30!