Sunday, September 28, 2008

Book Ordering Travails Part 3

Last Friday, I went for another round of book orders. I gave the customer service rep a list of 16 books. Here are the interesting results:

The Bad:

As far as books that I'll never be able to obtain goes, that award goes to PS Publishing as I tried to order Zoran Zivkovic's The Last Book. It's not listed in their system so I guess that rules out any PS Publishing Books.

There are also some books that are currently unavailable. For example, I gave them the ISBN for Majestrum: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn by Matthew Hughes. What they jotted down on my list is that "No Paperback" [Available]. Same goes for John Grant's Corrupted Science (except it's "No Hardcover").

I also discovered that various books have different discounts. Michael Cisco's The Traitor for example only had a 5% discount which meant that it's really really expensive for me to acquire it. On another extreme, a book like Clockwork Phoenix, which has a retail price of $10.95, is actually costing me P1135 or $24.00.

The Good:

I'm actually grateful that I'm able to acquire books from Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Senses Five Press, Subterranean Press, and Norilana Books.

Having said that, here's the books that I actually ended up ordering (because I was strapped for cash):

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Same goes for John Grant's Corrupted Science (except it's "No Hardcover")."

How curious. In reality, the book's only available in hardcover!

Charles said...

Hi John!

I think they meant they didn't have the hardcover in stock.

Your other book science book, on the other hand, is very much available. I just ran out of money. =(

Anonymous said...

"I just ran out of money. =("

Well, that's no excuse!

Anonymous said...

Hi Charles;

Sorry to see you're unable to order PS Publishing titles through your local store. Being a very small press, I suspect some stores are unwilling to deal with us because they can't get bulk discount deals - we do have trade customers, but they tend to be the smaller specialist genre fiction stores. Our stuff is all listen on Nielsen, for example, so it's not as if the titles aren't out there on the systems.

We're looking at ways of expanding availability in future, but in the meantime drop me a line at: press [at] pspublishing [dot] co [dot] uk, and we'll see if there's some way we can look at getting our titles to you more effectively.

In the meantime, keep on bloggin'! :)