Hopefully this link will work okay: my artist friend Sara Kathleen is liquidating her studio to make room for the new madness she’ll be creating next year. Her work is amazing. Go buy stuff!
Tag: sales
Proof of life
…I’m here, I promise. It’s been a hell of a long week, honestly– Sunday was spent doing mostly nothing at work and trying to recover from the case of 24-hour Con Crud that I came home with, Monday and Tuesday were the Longest Days Ever at work, and then Wednesday and yesterday I pretty much sat around the house playing Nioh. I managed to get out tonight; the three of us went to dinner and then selected pumpkins at a local patch; there will likely be some sort of carving thing happening on Sunday night, so there’s a post right there.
Actually, Monday’s shenanigans deserve at least a brief mention, if only in a holy shit I survived that sort of way. We sell beds, right? We also sell what we, perhaps too grandly, are supposed to call top-of-bed products and most of us just call bedding, because saying top-of-bed products is Goddamned stupid.
Anyway, we’re clearancing out all of our bedding. All of it. Every last piece. We’re doing it because we’re bringing in an entirely new line of stuff, and the old stuff has to go before the new stuff comes in. As you do. Selling bedding has always been fun, because in addition to the usual commission we make a substantial number of points on it too. We get paid 20% of our points (which we can get for a variety of reasons) at the end of every week, meaning it’s not only basically immediate money but it’s good money– you can make $20 on a $100 bed set, and our bed sets went up to $300.
As of Sunday, we were still paying out full points for bedding. Which meant when I sold a set of bedding for– get this– $24.99, that money basically went straight into my pocket. So I was actually pretty damn excited about the idea of steering every single person who walked in the door toward buying bedding, and making up for several weeks of low pay.
And then they turned points off on Monday, meaning that where I was expecting to make about $20 a sale I made $1.25 instead, and instead of the usual three or four sales for a Monday I had twenty-nine, well over half of which involved stripping a bed and bagging everything up. By myself, since I was the only person on my side of the store.
And then Tuesday I did it again, only with eighteen sales instead of 29, because most of the good shit got sold on Monday.
So yeah. I’ve been tired. Real tired. I’ll try and post more next week.
In which I tell you what to do and ask you to spend money
WHAT TO DO: Come see me at Kokomo-Con 8 this Saturday! I should have been packing and getting ready today, but instead I played Nioh and lazed around. The con is from 10-6 at the Kokomo Event and Conference Center. Admission is just $10! I’ll be in Booth 59 on this map:
I’ll have books. I’ll be selling them! And signing them! There will also be Oreos. It’s okay if you just come by for the Oreos.
That’s not actually the bit where I ask you to spend money, though.
GO BUY THIS: My friend Sara Kathleen is an artist and she’s made a doodle coloring book. Her doodles are really cool and she’s only asking $13 for the book. Okay, she’s in England so she’s asking for ten pounds, but hell if I know how to make my keyboard do that little L thing. Check out her website and kick her a preorder before they end on Monday. Shipping is free, even to the States!
Good night, in other words
Eighteen sales today, for just under nine grand, with an absolutely insane four-and-a-half hour period that I’m pretty sure was my busiest single block of time since I’ve been selling furniture. Then the books didn’t balance and it took another hour after closing to figure out what went wrong and get to go home.
A brief work anecdote I forgot to tell yesterday
This one’s new.
We all have emails at our jobs, like I’m sure a lot of you do, and also like I suspect a lot of work email accounts, they’re really locked down in terms of what we can send and/or receive. Chief among these things: images, which is a serious pain in the ass because “send me a picture” is one of the first things you want to tell people when they call you and tell you something is damaged, and that means we have all had to create alternate work email addresses that can receive images.
Not the point. Point is I have a work email. It’s on my business cards. I hand out lots of business cards, as you can probably imagine.
I checked said work email late yesterday evening for the first time in a couple of days (Saturday is my Monday, for the record) and had two emails from PayPal. One of them was letting me know that I had money in my account, and the other was reminding me that I had money in my account.
My work email doesn’t have a PayPal account. Why the fuck would I have a PayPal account under my work email?
It turns out that a customer who had come in and gotten a quote on some side chairs had decided to pay for them by sending me the money via PayPal. Me, personally, at my work account. There’s a note attached to the payment: “4 blahblah side chairs.”
How the fuck is anyone stupid enough to think this is how anything works?
How the fuck do I get through a conversation with this idiot without using the word “idiot”? Because this person is an idiot and deserves to be called one.
Christ.
Good old-fashioned blog- and saleswanking, plus some whining
First day of fall today, supposedly. Not that I could tell; it was goddamn near 90 outside, the hottest day in weeks. We’ve had a couple of mild summers in a row around here, which is good since I’m incapable of handling heat.
Trying to decide what I ought to do next. Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 is out next Tuesday, and can still be pre-ordered digitally for $2.99 or– sssh, don’t tell anyone— bought in print for $8.99. Unless you’re a Prime member, the book’s not getting to you before the 26th, so we’ll call it day-and-date and not worry about it. In general, presale numbers have not been making me happy. My presales have gone up with every book until this one, but with four days until release BA 3 has fewer presales than anything else I’ve released so far. I’ll take the blame for a good chunk of that; I haven’t had the time or energy to invest into properly marketing the thing, and it doesn’t help that blog traffic has looked like this for a while now:
Now, 2015 is a little unrepresentative– a single post was good for over a hundred thousand of those hits, and there’s still a few months left in 2017, but the overall downward trend is pretty evident. My twitter feed has been locked in at about 10K followers for over a year now, and nothing I can do will move the numbers. And the books aren’t selling very well, and aren’t getting reviews at all. I just fiddled around in KNP’s sales dashboard to generate a useful graph, but just picture a line dwindling to near-zero several months ago and staying there, other than a brief blip when Balremesh came out. Presales on that were good, but it appears that everyone who wanted it pre-ordered it. I’d blame the occasional free weekend, but my sales were shit before I put everything back on Kindle Select again, so nothing’s changed in that regard.
This is starting to sound like a Goodbye Cruel World sort of post, and maybe it should be, but it’s mostly me casting around trying to figure out how to shake things up in my life. Being an author is important to me, but I don’t think I can really go back to doing that until I figure out a way to not be a furniture salesman anymore– I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these sales downturns started hitting when I stopped teaching, and got seriously bad when I started at my current job. The blog traffic predates that, yeah, but it’s kinda tough to surpass a year where you have a single post get 39,000 shares on Facebook.
And then there’s the question of the Next Book, and whether I should even try to start the next book right now, or focus on fixing everything else before I worry about that. It’ll probably be me going back to the Skylights universe and trying to nail the sequel to that book properly, but there’s another book bouncing around in my head trying to get out that doesn’t fit in with any of my established universes and might be fun to write. But I’ve kind of liked the last few weekends where I’m not stressing about whether I’m writing all the time, so maybe I need a break. I dunno.
Emerging from the wreckage
I’ve said this before; in fact, I say it damn near every year: as someone who has been a union member and a union representative for damn near my entire adult life, I consider Labor Day my holiday in a way that is very unique to it. I try to never forget that motherfuckers literally died so that the concept of the “weekend” could exist, much less a day where damn near everyone is expected to stay home and eat various grilled meats and swill alcoholic beverages.
Labor Day for the last couple of years has had a bit of a sting to it, because I’ve had to work and I do not like working on Labor Day. I won’t complain about the money; the sales I made yesterday are going to earn me around $600 or so in commissions when they pay out, and making $600 in a single day of work is nothing to sneeze at. This entire weekend was insanely busy, and today was nuts as well, and tomorrow I have another full day, because our present for Labor Day this year was that everyone on the staff gets to work another six hours longer than usual, and remember this is a job that is already 45+ hours every single week.
There are those who have it much worse, of course. I’m aware of that. But this, I think, will be the last time that I allow this to happen to me. I’ve given enough hours of my life, enough weekends, to this job. And this is about to be the second night in a row where I’ve gotten home from work at can’t-see at night and been in bed within half an hour.
Enough. Time to find something else.
In which I will not sell to you
I have decided something, as of yesterday. I am no longer going to be selling furniture to anyone I know in the real world. I will continue to recommend that people who know me in my Clark Kent guise come into my store if they need to buy stuff, but I’m not going to be your salesman. I’ll hand you over to someone who is good at their job and let them do it and that’s going to be it. Why, you might ask? Because since I’ve been working at the store I’ve had four people who I know IRL come in specifically to buy from me because they knew I worked at a furniture store. The following things have happened:
- Person #1 bought a coffee table and a couple of other things. The other pieces were fine but the coffee table came in broken. Twice.
- Person #2 bought a sofa and love seat. They were slightly backordered when they were ordered and they proceeded to slide back repeatedly after being ordered, and took, if I remember correctly, nearly two months to come in.
- Person #3 ordered a customized sofa and loveseat. Normally these are pretty bulletproof in terms of coming in on time so long as they’re ordered correctly. Note the caveat in that sentence, though. For these folks, I discovered that what is called a “loveseat” when it is sold in the normal configuration is called a “sofa with console” if you special-order it, and so they had to wait eight weeks (normal for a special order) for the wrong goddamn loveseat to show up in the store and then eight more weeks for the one they wanted. Of the four, this is the only one that was unambiguously and clearly my fault; that said, I blame the company because that’s completely ridiculous.
- Person #4 ordered a loveseat that was also slightly backordered and supposed to arrive in early April. When it finally arrived– in the middle of May– it was, inexplicably, the loveseat that they’d ordered but in the wrong fabric. The loveseat in question cannot be special ordered and does not come in that fabric. In other words, I couldn’t have ordered it the way they got it if I’d wanted to. No one has any idea how the hell this one happened. It has to have been some sort of screw-up at the factory but here’s the kicker: our company owns that factory, and we don’t sell our furniture to other furniture stores. So it’s not like this was the way this piece gets sold at Furniture Store B and it got shipped to Furniture Store A by accident. Even the warehouse guys at our main facility in Mississippi had no idea at all how this happened. This is, in other words, some bullshit.
So, yeah. I’ve learned my lesson and I’m done. I still recommend that you buy stuff from my store– despite those four examples, this shit really doesn’t happen all that often— but apparently I’ve gotten hit with the bad-luck stick in terms of selling to people I know. So I’m done.
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