When life gives you lemons…

I’ve recorded this story twice. The Fabulists get the story now (complete with swearing. Lots of swearing…) and the feed will have the story next Friday. But abbreviated tale is here: I’m trying to figure out what to do with ninety one books I can’t sell.

“Daily” Fabulist 6- How I fucked up.

Essentially, one of the Afterlife books came with a big error on the cover. And it was my fault (not Lulu’s). So I had to either give a less than stellar-looking book to my supporters, or drain my business account and replace the books.

After research and fretting and swearing (and gin drinking to see if an altered mindset would help with problem solving), I ordered the books. $1400. My book designer very graciously helped out, for the record, so it wasn’t all out of my pocket. So my supporters will have good copies of the book (but not by Balticon.)

When life gives you poop, make poop juice. ~Red Meat*

Now that I’ve solved that, I have no more, “what am I going to do?” angst, and now I have, “I can’t believe I screwed up that badly and had to pay $1400 to fix it” angst. There’s also the issue of the ninety one books sitting around my house that I can’t sell. After talking to two friends, I formulated a plan.

Marketing materials.

Today, Heaven will be uploaded to Smashwords, and I’m going to create coupons to get a free copy. I will create physical coupons and put one each into the incorrect Hell copies. (Remember, the interior of the book- the story – is still just fine.) I will mail out the incorrect Hell copies with some of the packages going to supporters (they will have the correct copy they paid for- this is an extra) with the request- please give this to a friend. So the friend gets what we’ll call an advanced uncorrected proof of book 2 (those are allowed to have mistakes!), and an opportunity to download book 1 for free.

The recipient gets two free books. My supporters get to look good and generous. And I get some marketing material out of this SNAFU. It’s more than I would normally spend on marketing, but that was out of my hands. I hope something good comes of it.

All right, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! ‘I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?’ Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s going to burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down! ~Cave Johnson, Portal 2

I’m not happy about this. But I have a solution. And an extremely important lesson about checking your work before printing out books. And ordering proofs. I’m calling this Santa Proofing- check everything twice.

See ya’ll at Balticon. With books.

*So I went searching for this comic, and couldn’t find it. I did find this helpful screenshot though.