05/21/05 SAT:
---I hate it when booksellers are over-zealous in thinking up new schemes for how to sell their books. I try to keep myself from being that way too--but I can’t help it sometimes. I’ve figured out that I should make my discounts available to everyone that orders from me directly, instead of adhere to the fee-based Membership Discount Plan that has been a fixture with me for years. Now I am dickering with how to give people more of a say in what publishers I order from and when. At my present admittedly less ambitious bookselling pace (than when I was issuing regular printed-peper catalogs). it can be a long haul between orders to the many different publishers where I have accounts. I always think it won’t--or might not--be too long before I can send an order to any given publisher, but sometimes--or lots of the time--my thinking is wrong. A few people have given me the idea that if they have a credit amount in account I can try harder to get the books they have ordered. Basically my discount plan applies to books I have in stock--by no means a complete inventory of what I ought to have in stock (being more complete, perhaps, in what I ought not to have); but I don’t want to discourage special-orderers, because I like to know what people want, and because when I send orders to publishers it is nice to know that I have some of the books already spoken for. Anyway, without coming up with some actual scheme, I might mention that anyone with a credit in account--achieved by overpaying for books (which is maybe anathema)--will have more say-so in what books I can actually get (and in more timely fashion). This does not mean that someone who orders six books from six different publishers and prepays for them will necessarily get me to order from all six in a much timelier manner, but it will make me look at which order I can send out to a publisher will make the biggest dent in (or overwhelm) that credit. My computer has been doing a pretty good job, I think, of keeping track of peoples’ credits, so even if I’m slow and prone to lapses in memory myself, there shouldn’t be too much risk that in the long run you won’t get something for your money--and a pretty good deal too. This isn’t really a scheme to try to suck extra money, but to enable me to be more efficient in ordering from publishers. Well anyway, that is something I have been thinking about.