I have avoided email for many years because it does not fit well into my business model. The majority of my customers order a sizeable number of books once or twice a year to fill out holes in a collection they are building. Websites like Amazon.com on the other hand cater to a clientele who order one book at a time and want it the next day. While I welcome such people as well, my main interest lies with those trying to build a collection. After all, that is how I got into this business, and is why I remain in the business. This is not a money making proposition. I am trying to build a great collection, and only have a webpage to sell because I need an outlet for the duplicates and extras I accumulate.
Therefore, while I do have email for communication, there are preferred way to use it, to better serve collectors, as follows:
- I cannot accept orders by email.
- As I want to encourage fewer but larger orders, snailmail makes more sense to me. My wife or myself do all the order filling and packaging. It takes no more time to wrap a package with 40 books in it as 1 book. We have no employees, I work a fulltime job as an Aerospace Engineer and have precious little free time. Also, I have no way to accept credit cards or electronic payments, so a letter is necessary in any case.
- I do not accept reservations or wantlists for books or pulps by email, snailmail or any other means.
- to better serve collectors, my rule remains the same. The first person to send me a check gets the scarce items. For letters arriving with the same postmark, the larger order (in terms of number of items- not dollar value) gets filled first.
- Do not use email to have me check to see if items are still in stock
- It takes as long to check if items are still on the shelves as to fill the order. And since another order may take some of the items ahead of your check, this is not a good way to use my limited time, which would be better spent filling orders on hand that always seem to pile up.
- email can be used for the following
- General conversation about Science Fiction which I always enjoy
- checking on orders if several weeks have passed
- offering items for sale, trade, or consignment.
- questions of a general nature if I can help
- checking on the availibility of expensive items- those over $20.
The above rules sound terribly outdated. But consider this. It is very hard to find a site on the Internet where the nost common price for an item is $1.50 or less. I could adopt the practices of Amazon and others, with automated shopping carts and checkouts. But after pricing many such systems, I found I would have to double prices on inexpensive items, and raise them by 20% on larger items. Plus hire people to put barcodes on all my items. This goes against my mission of providing a place for collectors to build their collections at an affordable cost. Bear with all my eccentricities and keep an inexpensive site like this alive.
By the way, there are likely to be items that you will want to purchase from Amazon.com in any case. I know I do from time to time. Clicking through the link above helps me in a small way, does not cost you extra, and further insures the long term survival of this website. I have served collectors for over 40 years, and hope to do so for another 40.
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