It happens to all of us who order books — we make mistakes, sometimes huge mistakes. Sometimes publishers make mistakes and send vast quantities more than you ordered.
So, as we enter a new decade, I’m curious what has been your worst ordering nightmare?
In a fit of "they’ll run out of it" frenzy, I somehow ordered eight cartons of Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life several Christmases ago. While I absolutely adore this lovely, important book, it was $100 and each copy weighed 7.5 pounds. When I stacked my cartons, now magically in stock everywhere, I feared the floor would buckle. I still have some copies because it’s just too expensive to return.
Elizabeth ordered eight sets of the entire Little House on the Prairie series with the black and white illustrations several years ago when it was rumored they were going out of print because the covers were redone. While we love the color illustrations, there is something lovely about the original. Of course, the books never went out of print (the redone covers with photographs of real kids was the version that went out of print) and we had more than enough Little House to keep us stocked for quite a while.
I usually find full-sized wrap to be too long for wrapping a book efficiently, so I generally have my gift wrap rolls cut in half. Feeling smug with my frugality, I ordered a new wrap without checking its size first, and asked for the ream to be cut in half. Well, when the wrap arrived it was teeny tiny. It’s so narrow we can only use it for mass market titles; it’s fairly useless, but it’s pretty.
So, please, one and all, share your ordering mis-ship nightmares, over orders, or other stock miscues.
My first author event for my bookstore was s book by Kent Weeks called “The Lost Tomb”. While it was a really interesting book, apparently we didn’t need 200 of them. Live and learn I guess 🙂
The children’s book buyer at the store where i used to work once sent her Harper electronic order 4 times because it didn’t appear to be going through. Turned out that Harper’s system had recorded all four entries and since she didn’t check we ended up with… you guessed it, 4 times the amount of books we actually needed. A nightmare all the way around.
I buy for a public library system so books that come with extra “parts” or loose “memorabilia” are always a mistake that I didn’t notice in the description. But one time a sexual education type book came with a “toy” as a bonus….they still talk about it down in receiving.
I entered 30 instead of 3 once. Not that big of a deal, but my manager was puzzled by my choice. I did a big display near the register and ended up reordering the book a couple of times. So, sometimes a mistake works out. I meant to do it the whole time!
when I worked at a mall bookstore years ago, a truck driver delivered 16 displays of a V.C. Andrews book instead of the 16 single copies that were supposed to be ordered for us…. you can imagine my horror!
And then there are those where either the sender or the receiver mistakes 20 copies for 20 displays. We had LOTS of advent calendars that year, and of course they all arrived during the UPS strike. I couldn’t pay for them, but neither could I bear to tell the frazzled postman that he’d have to come pick them up. We must have waited for the strike to end, as we no longer have those calendars. And to think it was the opening order with that publisher!
I bought Lemony Snicket’s “The Beatrice Letters” for my library system, then found out that the letters all punched out of the book! Great for the first borrower. Not so much for the rest!
I totally neglected to thank Holly Ruck, my Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for suggesting the idea for the post. Thanks, Holly!
Have you ever mistakenly ordered a ‘deluxe’ or ‘special’ edition that is easily 3 times the price of the regular? Luckily we could return the order I placed for ALL those deluxe Harry Potters and get the regular edition instead!
If I were you, in a month or so, when winter seems to be dragging on really long, I’d have a “Long Winter” event to move the Little House books. Read a chapter out loud, serve cocoa, do a craft project related to the book (maybe twist straw into logs the way they do?)–and sell the books! I would come and bring my daughter if I lived nearby!
We have to submit orders through the administrative office and then once approved they actually do the ordering. One year I did not label the pages and they ended up ordering the same things from two different vendors. So had lots of books to sort out and return and then I had to determine what was NOT sent/ordered (because they ran out of money sending me all of these doubles) and I had to keep following up on the companies to see where the books were. It was a nightmare. Now I clearly label everything!
I work in publishing – marketing. Years ago I submitted for an award list. I wanted one copy each of about 20 titles to go to each of 10 committee members (probably one box). The warehouse sent 10 copies of each title to each committee member! They were each getting about 7-8 boxes. As it turns out, it was way too expensive to have UPS pick them up (we could have reprinted the books for less), so they each got to donate the books to the organization(s) of their choice.
I once ordered 12 copies of a calendar and was horrified when 1200 showed up! Not my bad-someone at the publisher’s hit the wrong numbers!