Books Shipped

I shipped out another 5 books to Amazon today. That's up from the 2 on their first order. I saw that the two I had sent them were sold and my page says Temporarily Out of Stock. Not good. People won't buy if it's out of stock. I thought Amazon had a super-duper inventory tracking and ordering system, but it is not as robust as I expected. Millions of items to keep track of, sure, but if you're going to be that big you've got to have the systems to back it up. They're good, but they need some work.

So after a couple of days of waiting for an order from them I contacted them. I am impressed at how quickly they do respond when I send them a message, and they answer the question too. Not bad. They told me I can monitor the inventory and send them an order request when their inventory is low. Not the best solution from my point of view, but I will do that since I want to sell the books. As soon as they answered my question they also placed the order, which I promptly sent them today.

I also found out about Amazon U.K. It is a totally separate entity (operated separately). I can register with them and do the same thing I'm doing with Amazon U.S. - Except - I have to have a U.K. bank account to do that.

O.K., I thought. Can I do that and is it worth it? Being an American English book, how well will it sell in the U.K.? But I thought with all the internet banks out there now setting up a U.K. bank account shouldn't be too difficult. Oh, how naive I am. No Can Do. Apparently, without being physically present in the U.K. and having a U.K. address it is impossible to open a bank account. And it sounds like even if you have those it's not always that easy to open an account if you're not a citizen. Being a business, I'd have to set up and register my business in the U.K. before I could open a bank account there.

Probably not feasible at this point, nor even necessary. This is when I start to re-think signing up with a distributor, one who has overseas offices. Or this could be a wonderful excuse to go back to Scotland!





Golden Ox Publishing