A trip down memory lane

I was uploading pictures from my phone when I came across these photos. Yes, that is a shopping cart in my foyer, and no, it was not stolen (my condo keeps half a dozen on the property, since it’s a bit of a journey from the parking lot to the top floor of the building). This is what my house looked like on August 4, when I was sending out that initial load of ‘pre-orders’ for The Cornerstone book that were taken through my website.

The books arrived much later than I had expected, so I was already kinda freaked out, and I was going up to NY to spend the last week of summer break with my fiancee. The day before my flight, I was on pins and needles praying that the books would arrive in time. Otherwise, all of the orders would have to wait ANOTHER week until I got back, and I knew people wanted to read their copies before school started.

Well, God is faithful–UPS delivered the shipment to me TWO HOURS before the post office closed for the day. (See the brown boxes piled in the background? Yeah. There were 21 of those.) You should have seen me, all Tasmanian devil-like: unpacking boxes of books, autographing, shoving them in Priority Mail envelopes, affixing stamps, and piling them up in that ridiculous shopping cart which blocked my way out of the 720 square foot apartment. I had already addressed the envelopes, fortunately, so I was able to get the shopping cart, little rolling cart, and a few boxes completely processed and dropped off at the Post Office before 7 pm. (Each book is 500 pages and weighs 2.2 pounds. Needless to say, the postal workers were not thrilled to see me coming.)

Whew. So August was a bit busy and stressful. Since then, things have slowed down a bit, as they do for all education-related book sales in late September. (There’s also a decline in my web visitors after school starts, and the trend continues until January. Fortunately, I’ve been tracking this since 2003 so I didn’t go into cardiac arrest when book sales and web hits dropped.)

The book’s reception has been phenomenal, in large part because of word of mouth. Those of you who have been following the site for years told your friends, who told their friends…and the book is selling internationally now. Okay, so not particularly well yet, other than in Canada, but better than expected, considering I self-published and don’t have a ‘marketing machine’ (or budget) behind me. This has been a total grass-roots effort, a product created by a teacher and publicized through teachers, and I think I’m more proud of that fact than any other.

So that’s the book update. I haven’t done much promotion since school started for obvious reasons, but plan to get back on the ball in the coming weeks. If you love the book, help me out! Add your book reviews to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, blog about it or recommend it to your favorite blogger so s/he can blog about it, and buy copies for your coworkers for the holidays. Also, I totally appreciate the emails you all send. I am still answering each one personally, even if it takes awhile to get back to you, because you rock. Seriously.