The bad news: I learned a very important lesson: Don’t believe everything customer service reps say on the phone. If they don’t email you details, they might just be making stuff up to make you happy. I just discovered Amazon can only fulfill 5,000 units of Kickstarter inventory so I’m looking for a 3rd party to send my Kickstarter peeps their rewards. Amazon also limits how many books a publisher can store in their inventory at a time (5,000 copies). With a 2-3 week delivery/restocking process, I’m not even killing enough trees to make the NY Times Best-seller list (which I won’t qualify for anyway because my sales are online). Once sold out, I’m allowed to petition Amazon for an increase in my storage limit–from which they’ll decide how much more space to give (it’s always a fractional, at most a 0.6 increase). I’m not going to be setting any selling records, that’s for sure. It looks like the first volley of books from my Kickstarter campaign will be 30,000 copies + 5,000 more on Amazon.
The good news: I’m reminded how much fun it is to talk to printers. It means I’m nearing the end of a project.
The only time I ever missed a printing deadline was in 1992, after an earthquake wrecked the SoCal printer doing my job. Now and then, force majeure has its day.