One of the occasional joys of running a small press is getting an excited e-mail from a customer about one of your books.  I had exchanged e-mails earlier in the week with a woman who said that she had been waiting a long time and hadn’t received a book we’d shipped a while ago.  My policy in those cases is to send another one in the next day’s mail– I’m sure that this has meant that the customer ended up with two copies the few times it’s happened, but if first class mail takes more than about 10 days to deliver, I’m assuming something went wrong.  So I wrote back immediately to this woman and told her I’d put a replacement in the mail the next day, but before I went to the post office in the morning, I had a note saying that it was a false alarm and the book had just arrived.

About three hours later, the same woman wrote back a wonderful note complimenting the book, and asked for a catalog.

I get feedback about books in person, but it doesn’t happen too often that I hear back by e-mail from customers.  I put my card in every order, and confirm all e-mail orders from my personal account… that’s really more so they can report any problems, like damage in shipping, etc.  But when someone takes the time to send a personal note about how much they enjoyed a book, it means more than the sales.  It really does.

Keep supporting small presses.