Like Santa's Elves

(Lowrey, lovingly wrapping our Holiday Gift Sets as we scrambled to get all of our orders filled)

This post is a departure from our usual advocacy posts, but I thought you might be interested in seeing what goes on behind the scenes at Happy Tails Books when our books arrive from the printer, and pre-orders need to be filled.

Every time we publish a book, we allow customers to pre-order it as it's being printed. This helps cover the cost of printing, and it works out great for our customers because we offer either $2.00 off per book or a double donation to rescue. When the books finally arrive, I ship the orders immediately.

The volume of orders I need to ship is usually manageable, but this time around we had Pit Bull book orders, Labrador book orders, and Dachshund book back orders to fill, resulting in about 500 books needing to be shipped. The pressure was on not only because of the high volume of books, but also because it's almost Christmas and we knew we had to ship the books the moment they arrived.

And ship them we did! The books didn't come until 2pm, only leaving us 3.5 hours to pack orders and get them to the post office. Luckily, my co-editor, Lowrey, drove up to help (about an hour drive in questionable weather), and my parents lent a hand. We really did feel like Santa's workshop! My dad could pass for Santa, I could easily be mistaken for an elf, and Bill was our reindeer. (Which reindeer was the nervous one? That was Bill.)



It was a stretch, but at 5:05 all of the books had found their way to the post office. The total number of packages we sent was about 200. I'm crossing my fingers that everything arrives quickly, will you cross yours with me? We really did our best!

I've placed a "rush delivery" option on all of our books now, so procrastinators can still get books in time for the holidays. If I'm talking about you, please place your order soon!

Now that we've got our massive mailing out of the way, I'm refocusing on our upcoming breeds for 2010. We base our book order largely on rescue group enthusiasm, and so far the Boxer folks are really stepping up! I believe we'll be doing Boxers first, then German Shepherds and Pugs. I'm still trying to get a Chihuahua book together, but it has been surprisingly difficult to collect enough stories. Weird. Please help by encouraging your friends and family with rescued dogs to send over a story. Who knows, it might end up in a book!