The Trials of the Publishing Game

I had a much happier post planned—one in which I was going to introduce our two newest authors—about time too! But I’ve been majorly covered up, as usual, which is hopefully fixin’ to change (as they say here in Tennessee!) very soon. But I’ll announce that later too.

Of course, you know Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. I’ve seen crises similar to this one during my tenure at Abingdon Press. Let me explain . . .

Seasons in the Mist is set to release next Thursday, April 1, and it delivered to the warehouse Tuesday. So far so good. A week or so ago, I received an invite to exhibit our books—for free—at a couple of Association Library Exhibits, and naturally I signed up. But the books for the first one need to be there by March 31 at the latest. And we’re backordered on The Heart’s Journey Home—again, and I’m not complaining!!—and are waiting for that print run to deliver. Thankfully Jen had several copies to spare, so she shipped me enough to cover the exhibits, and they arrived this afternoon. I immediately added a couple of copies to my box, grabbed the address labels and packing tape, and raced in to Nashville to the warehouse to pick up my stash of SIM so I could add those too. From there to UPS to ship, and back home again.

I lugged the box of SIM into the house, grabbed the top copy, and took a moment to admire it happily It really is gorgeous! And then I casually flipped through the pages. And my heart stopped.

The last signature (set of 16 pages) is upside down. As you can see in the photo. Next to the jar of Milky Way Midnights with which I’m drowning my sorrows.

Needless to say, I raced for the phone. By now it was a wee bit past 5 p.m., and everybody at the printer and the warehouse had gone home. Naturally. And it’s the weekend, so nothing’s to be done until Monday. I can nicely stew about it for the next 2 ½ days.

Of course, it’s the printer’s error, so if there are enough defective copies to worry about, they will make it good. They’re wonderful people who do lovely work, and I have no doubt they’re going to be as concerned as I am. It happens . . . usually with one or more signatures out of order or missing altogether, but upside down can happen too because of the way books are put together.

I just talked to Deb on the phone, and thankfully her copies are all perfect. So at least part of the run is fine—hopefully most of it—but until every carton is gone through we have no way of knowing how many are defective. And we don’t want to ship defective copies because we’ll just end up paying to have them shipped back and replaced. So somebody is going to have to check several thousand copies individually. Not good for busy warehouse personnel. Because of insurance issues, it’s doubtful I’d be allowed to do it, besides . . . that’s a whole heck of a lot of books to go through one at a time! Sheesh. So NOT something I’d look forward to doing.

At this point, I can see I’m going to have a lovely weekend wondering about it. And then a lovely week after that until everything gets sorted out.

Oy veh!!!!